Not a Fig

August 16, 2011August 10, 2011 / Peter Mead / 1 Comment

Oliver Wendell Holmes is credited with this great quote – “I wouldn’t give a fig for simplicity this side of complexity, but I’d give my right arm for simplicity on the other side of complexity.”

Preacher, where do your sermons sit?

Cheaper than a fig – This is preaching that is simple because it is shallow. The preacher hasn’t wrestled with the text, hasn’t entered into the complexity of the passage, it’s theology, the interface between ancient text and contemporary listener, etc. The preacher is just demonstrating shallow incompetence. Technical commentaries have been ignored. The text has received only scant attention. The sermon is simple because it is simplistic. It doesn’t engage listeners. It doesn’t shed light. It doesn’t stir hearts. It has the nutritional value of a burger bun.

Complexity – This is preaching that has gone beyond the fig stage. The preacher has started to wrestle with the text. The preacher may have engaged in dialogue with some technical commentaries. The preacher has mapped out some or all of the complexities of the theology and its interface with contemporary life. It may be complex because the preacher hasn’t cut out unnecessary detail. Or it may be complex because the preacher hasn’t really got to grips with the details. Or it may be complex because the preacher is trying to impress. Whatever the cause, it is complex. Hard to listen to. The listener has to really work to benefit. Much nutrition, but as hard to digest as day-old steak.

Costly as a right arm – This is the goal. The preacher has gone beyond the shallow into the depths. The preacher has studied, and wrestled, and prayed, and thought themselves through to a place of clarity. This isn’t simplistic, this is profound, yet accessible, relevant, clear, engaging. They often say that the very best sportsmen and women make hitting the ball, shooting for goal, playing the game look so easy. It isn’t because they are just natural at it. It is because they have endured the work necessary to get to the other side of complexity. That’s why we pay so much to watch them. Too many preachers are worth less than a fig because they are simplistic, or so complex that the gold seems hard to mine. If only more preachers were right arm types – having thought themselves through to a level of clarity that is blessing to all who hear.

Maximum Content, Minimum Loss of Contact

August 12, 2011August 10, 2011 / Peter Mead / 4 Comments

Just listening to Fred Craddock and he was asked about notes versus no notes. His bottom line was that you want to have maximum content, with a minimum loss of contact with the listener. He also suggested that every preacher should be fully competent at preaching without notes, with notes and with full manuscript. Why?

Full manuscript preaching will be helpful when the subject is controversial. It allows for people to see exactly what was said, and allows for precision from the preacher. I was asked to preach on Euthanasia a few years ago. Full manuscript. It simply wasn’t possible to internalize all the content of that message (not least because it wasn’t rooted in a single text).

Notes are useful in preaching, Craddock said, when “there’s a lot of tiptoeing and maneuvering in the sermon to get through it.” This is a problem in too many sermons, but there may be occasions where it is necessary. Too often a sermon makes good sense to the preacher because they have the notes map in front of them and they know exactly where they’ve come from and where they’re going. But often the listener is as lost as a toddler in a forest.

“Usually, if you prepare for delivery rather than for writing, you will know it by the time you get through preparing.” I agree with this and tend to preach without notes. But I also agree with his follow-up comment. These three approaches are not stages through which the preacher graduates. While no notes may generally be the preferred option, it is not a point of achievement to grab attention from listeners. It is a choice the preacher makes dependent on the message and the situation. Sometimes, as a generally no notes preacher, I will do well to use a full manuscript.

Content and contact to the max.

Reasons to Just Preach

August 9, 2011August 9, 2011 / Peter Mead / 1 Comment

In many churches this post would be considered irrelevant or even bizarre. In others to suggest otherwise might raise an eyebrow or two. But in some, the choice can go either way. Should the preacher lead the whole service?

I’ve known a few people who insist that as the preacher they want to lead the whole service. It allows them to craft a whole package that fits together. It allows them expand the impact of their message beyond the official sermon time. And, I’d agree with this, it allows them to control how long they have to preach. But there are some reasons to just preach, if another service leader is available.

1. Increased focus in the preacher on the sermon. Instead of losing energy on earlier elements of the service, the preacher can prayerfully compose themselves so they are 100% focused on the sermon. No need to worry about introducing hymns, remembering the right people to mention in the prayers, covering the announcements adequately, and in many UK churches, no need to have a mini-sermon that is hyper-engaging for the children.

2. Increased focus on the preacher in the sermon. From the listeners’ perspective, when the preacher stands to preach, they haven’t already heard multiple snippets of the same voice. In some cases a preacher may undermine their impact by overdoing their involvement before the sermon. This is especially true if the preacher is not appropriately gifted or able as a service leader.

3. Opportunity for other gifts to develop and be used. Some people are exceedingly capable when it comes to public reading of Scripture, or addressing children, or leading singing, or praying publically, etc. Why do some assume that the whole package of diverse gifting and ability will reside in one person? The Bible does not teach the exclusive gifting of a clerical class, but the gifting of all for the good of all. Why not unleash folks in their area for the good of the church?

From my perspective, as a preacher, I would much rather not lead the entire service when I am preaching. If it is requested or preferred, then I can do so (and I console myself with controlling the time allowed for the sermon). But give me the option of just preaching, following capable and trustworthy people, and I would bite your hand off for that option. What do you think?

Knowing the Unknowable?

August 4, 2011August 4, 2011 / Peter Mead / 4 Comments

Yesterday I wrote about thinking through how your listeners will hear what you say so you can pre-empt misunderstandings. Dave commented and asked what to do with a new/unknown group of listeners? Great question. I don’t have the answer, but I do have some thoughts. Please comment to add yours.

1. An unknown congregation is not unknown to God. So pray. Pray for them. Pray for the preaching. Pray that God will help you to find the information that will help you! This is no substitute for the three ideas that follow, but it is foundationally important.

2. An unknown congregation can become known by enquiry. That is, you might be able to ask and learn about a church ahead of time. Ask the person who invited you to speak. Call and speak to someone in leadership and express that you simply want to get a pulse in order to communicate more effectively. Look at their website (don’t judge a church by its website, even though others will). When you arrive, talk to the person who gets you wired up with the mic, and the person who meets you at the door, and the person sitting next to you, etc. Ask questions and you will get to know a church more.

3. An unknown congregation can become more known by observation. It is amazing what you can deduce by observing during the twenty or thirty minutes before a meeting, as well as during the first part of the service. Good observation skills make the world of difference.

4. An unknown congregation have some things in common with known congregations. The first two may be neither possible nor fruitful, but this one is. I think preachers need to be good students of human nature. Bryan Chappell writes about the Fallen Condition Focus in his book on preaching. His point is that when you see the influence of the Fall in a narrative, then the contemporary listener will find that narrative relevant, no matter how obscure it might be. The same applies here. People tend to fall into similar patterns of error, of misunderstanding the gospel, of church behaviour, of needing encouragement, of hunger, yet inadequacy, stressed, uncertain, etc.

I’d love to hear more on this. How do you, when you are preaching to an unfamiliar group, overcome the unfamiliarity?

I Have Always Struggled to Concentrate

July 27, 2011July 25, 2011 / Peter Mead / 3 Comments

Maybe you are like me? I have always struggled to concentrate. I remember sitting in church as a youth and often wondering how much longer the sermon would last. The clock never ticks so slowly as it can on a Sunday.

You can count bricks in the wall, make shapes with ceiling tiles, daydream, read the introductory preface to a hymn book, the translation philosophy of the Bible committee, etc.

You can think about yesterday, or tomorrow, or a distant memory, or an unlikely dream. You can do a lot of things during the thirty plus minutes of a sermon.

It is not that I am unable to concentrate. I’ve done okay academically and have focused through films and books and games and conversations and meals. But somehow sermons are a bit of struggle at times.

I doubt that I am unique. Maybe I am just a toddler in a grown-up body, but I suspect I am not alone. Maybe you are like me? I have always struggled to concentrate. Preacher, please help me out, and those like me. Be clear, make progress, get to your point, vary the presentation, be relevant, be biblical, be engaging, be a communicator.

Visual Check-Up

July 26, 2011July 25, 2011 / Peter Mead / 2 Comments

What you communicate is not merely about what you say. It is also about how you say it, both the tone and attitude of your voice, and the body language framing the whole communication event. Body language matters. It matters massively. If you don’t know that, try to contradict your words with your posture/gesture/expression and see what is heard by your experiment partner!

So for a quick five-point check-up. For best results, watch a video of yourself preaching. For next best results, ask a trusted friend or three to evaluate your body language. For benefit, think through the following prayerfully:

1. When you preach are you stilted or frozen? This happens to almost everybody when they are nervous, and some never seem to get over it. Strangely though, some are unaware of how petrified they become at the pulpit. As I tend to put it, being natural generally does not come naturally.

2. When you preach are you free and natural? This is obviously the opposite of the first question, but important to ponder some more. Are you more animated in sharing a personal anecdote or sporting memory with a group of friends than you are when you preach?

3. Is your visual presentation consistent? Some preachers tend to animate themselves in spurts. The first few minutes is all action, then by the end they seem to have contracted core hypothermia.

3b. Is your visual presentation consistent? Same question, different meaning. Do you consistently match content to visual presentation? Gesture to words (three fingers for the third in a list is always going to work better than four), expression to emotion, movement to geography, etc.?

4. Let’s be honest, are you aggravatingly repetitive? It could be a perma-grin, or a repeated gesture, or a rhythmic movement, or whatever. Any aspect of visual presentation will be aggravating once people notice it and can predict it.

5. Ok, one more honest one, are you grating in some way so listeners struggle to listen? Perhaps you come across as aggressive, or effeminate, or arrogant, or intimidating, or bombastic, or distracted, or hesitant, or whatever. Hard to pinpoint these things, but definitely worth finding out, somehow.

Summer Preaching

July 25, 2011July 25, 2011 / Peter Mead / 1 Comment

In preaching terms, summer is not a season of three months, it is a season of a few weeks. It is a season when significant proportions of the congregation are missing on any given Sunday. It is a season when significant proportions of those present are mentally missing, reminiscing or anticipating. Somehow summer seems to drain focus from a congregation.

The natural response of the preacher is to resent this intrusion into the focus of the folks in the pew. Yet perhaps a church needs the summer pace change as much as families and individuals do. In some cultures a church may shut for a couple of Sundays (since everyone has fled to the coast anyway), but maybe a change is as good as a rest.

Certainly the preacher shouldn’t cajole the people into a state of focus or determined forward momentum. Save the visionary leadership for the start of the next school year. For now, use the sermons for other purposes. Some suggestions:

1. Preach more stand-alone messages, rather than series that require regular attendance. Few, if any, will manage to hear a full summer series.

2. Use the opportunity to balance the preaching schedule. Perhaps you’ve been pounding out the gospels for a while, or epistles have become the staple diet. Consider some time in the Psalms, or Proverbs, or the Prophets.

3. Don’t feel bad about being engaging and interesting. Actually, consider being that way year round. However, if you are normally a high intensity communicator, consider lowering that intensity for the next weeks.

4. If you are the weekly preacher, share your pulpit. It may be a bit late for this year, but why not invite others to preach during these weeks? It could be a pulpit swap with another church in the area. Perhaps even better, it could be a chance to mentor some of the potential preachers in your church.

What do you do differently from the pulpit during the summer weeks?

Token Triumphalism

July 15, 2011July 15, 2011 / Peter Mead / 1 Comment

I think we should beware of token gestures of triumphalism in our preaching. I suppose we could go to the example of Michael in Jude in the Assumption of Moses moment, but I’m thinking slightly lower on the scale than the direct rebuking of Satan (although I have seen it done and don’t see the value of it).

Take, for instance, the direct rebuking of atheists. This can sound especially bizarre when the pointed comments about particular individuals are made in a manner that surely would be different were the individual in the room. I think the people in our churches need to be protected from the false teaching of atheists old and new. Especially when the media seem to fawn at the sight of a new book from Richard Dawkins, et al. But helping people see the problem with the teaching of a man is different than rebuking and attacking the man himself. The same holds for the teaching of extreme liberals like the Jesus seminar or Bart Ehrmann or historically flamboyant writers like Dan Brown. Help people see the error if appropriate, but don’t go celebrating the future demise of a man with fireworks or attacking him as if he is the devil.

Then there is another bizarre twist, when the preacher decides to attack Christians who are engaging with such folks. Whether it be a John Lennox for debating the new atheists, or a Darrell Bock for writing about the Da Vinci Code, or whoever. Somehow a small-minded preacher critiquing brothers who are serving the church by engaging and critiquing such works as The God Delusion or whatever, somehow it just seems a bit pathetic. I have no aspiration to enter the mainstream debate scene or write to uncover the errors in new atheistic argumentation. But I am thankful for those that do. Different parts of the body of Christ at work for the good of us all. If I, as a preacher, decide to ridicule or reject the efforts of men like Lennox and Bock, I don’t show a superior or even a biblical form of Christianity. What I show is small-minded, uninformed and paper-thin Christianity.

We could think about other religions too. Again, it is important for our people to be informed about the uniqueness of Christ and the dangers in the cults or religions vying for their attention. Let’s do so accurately and graciously, rather than sounding off in the safety of our own company.

There’s one more category, but I won’t develop the thought. Some preachers seem very quick to mock, critique, ridicule and put down other churches and denominations. Again, there may be a place for gracious contrasting or critiquing, but cheap shots and token triumphalism somehow tends to undermine a person’s preaching, making them look small and sometimes quite silly.

The Destructive Power of the Patronising Quip

July 12, 2011 / Peter Mead / 2 Comments

It is simple really, people don’t like to be patronized. So don’t. That is, if you want them to hear what else you are saying, assuming the patronizing comment is not the main idea of your message, don’t do it. It is like speaking to your spouse for ten minutes and throwing in a couple of insults along the way – what do you think they will go away thinking about?

I’m sure we all know what it is to be patronized, but let me share some patronizing comments that I’ve heard from the pulpit in recent years (just to be sure we are all alert to the range available to us if we want to undermine a sermon or two!)

Patronizing the locale – “So this is the little town of…” Maybe it is “little” from the visiting speaker’s perspective, but most locals don’t like outsiders telling them where they live is insignificant. Call it pride if you will, but don’t expect such a warm hearing.

Patronizing the church – “I come from a church of X hundred, but it’s so nice to be in an intimate gathering like this…” It’s like being a tourist. Comment positively as much as you like, but not in implied comparison with the bigger and better that you have come from.

Patronizing the knowledge – “Have you ever considered the difference the next word makes to this passage?” Unless you are claiming to have come up with something new, some of them probably have considered that. (And if you’ve got something new, you may have a different problem on your hands!) Along similar lines, “turn to X in your Bibles, you’ll need to use the table of contents to find!”

Patronizing the experience – “You may not have seen this before…” This is similar to the previous comment, it implies that you are a first time guide (which generally grates on those seasoned travellers through the Bible). Bizarrely I heard one preacher say, “If you read through John’s Gospel every week for twenty years, you would see this…” I don’t know if that is patronizing or just plain deceptive – I struggle to believe the implication that since he had done that he could now show us this wonderful insight in the text (it was a fanciful, or should I say, a theologically driven twisting of the text on that occasion!)

The strange thing about patronizing is that it tends to be in the form of passing comments, rather than overall content. This isn’t a hard and fast statement. Surely some preachers may come across as patronizing in everything they say, but I suspect that is primarily attitude. The point is, people don’t mind hearing basic messages. The way to avoid patronizing is not to wow the listener with new insight, clever exegesis or overwhelming passion. The way to avoid patronizing is to speak with love for the listener. When we are sensitive to how we come across, then we will filter out the unhelpful quips along the way.

Preacher, Please Know What You Are Talking About!

July 6, 2011July 6, 2011 / Peter Mead / 3 Comments

This should go without saying, but apparently it doesn’t. When you preach, please know what you are talking about! There are few things that undermine integrity as quickly as a preacher making mistakes in what they say.

We all make mistakes, and there is grace, of course. I’ve made mistakes. You have too. But the difficulty here is that ignorance is never obvious in the mirror. It is really hard to know what we don’t know.

I would love to give some examples, but I’ll keep this slightly general. Here are some categories:

1. Do you know the book from which your preaching text is drawn? Now and then a preacher will come out with something about a Bible book that leaves those who know their Bibles thoroughly confused. Actually, they will see through the preacher, but the ignorant will swallow the error.

2. Do you know the context of the cross-referencing you are doing? It is easy to spin off a text and dip into another part of the canon (either quoting or referring to content). But do you know that area of the Bible? If you only studied for your preaching text then you might easily make errors in regard to that other part of the Bible.

3. Do you know your theology as well as you think you do? Sometimes preachers will make theological points that have no foundation in the preaching text (or any other text, for that matter). This might be done when trying to show orthodoxy in some way – for example, wanting to affirm the full deity and humanity of Christ, but forcing that into an explanation of something to do with Christ’s ministry where it doesn’t fit.

4. Do you know the facts of the illustrative material you are using? I heard a preacher apparently trying to quote a key figure in church history, yet his introductory comments about him betrayed a significant ignorance of that church history. The same could be true when presenting a scientific or cultural example – getting the facts wrong, or even looking shaky, will undermine integrity.

5. Last but certainly not least, have you actually looked carefully at the text you are preaching? There is nothing worse than a preacher going off on a point about something, apparently trying to link it to the text, but ignoring the adjacent phrase that undermines the entire point.

Know the text, know the context, know the book, the Bible, and any realm from which illustrative materials are drawn. Hard work? Of course.