How to . . . ?

People Communicate

/ Peter Mead / 3 Comments

We can subconsciously slip into viewing preaching as something other than communication. How so? Well, we can slip into thinking it is about simply teaching information, or view it as a literary exercise (written and read), or view it as a liturgical procedure. But preaching is about communication. Even though it is typically monological, it is still communication.

For communication to occur there has to be connection between people. I heard a teacher say recently in respect to using media, “When I communicate the scriptures it may be old news to me, but it has to be good news to connect with people. . . The good news became a person. . . People communicate, not things.” I would extend that thought by suggesting that people communicate, not statements, nor facts, nor anecdotes, but people.

How easily we lose sight of this and end up with good content, well illustrated, relevantly applied, clearly structured, but still fail to communicate because we fail to pay attention to the need for interpersonal connection. I sat in a meeting a while back and the speaker didn’t smile until 53 minutes into the meeting. Not ideal for connection. The message met every criteria, except it didn’t seem to connect. It lacked smile, warmth, empathy, energy, enthusiasm, eye contact, connection.

People may not typically respond verbally in your church, but preach so as to stir response internally. Preach so that they are interacting mentally and emotionally with the message, and with you. If they don’t connect, they won’t trust you, and deep down, they will distrust the message too (even while affirming it, they will remain applicationally cold toward it, because you seem interpersonally cold toward them).

Is It Ever Appropriate to Preach the Same Text to the Same Church?

/ Peter Mead / 4 Comments

Simple question.  Simple answer?  Yes.

But what about people thinking you haven’t prepared something fresh so you are just reworking old material?  What about the feeling of deja vu that will overcome the listeners?  What about?  What about?

As a preacher you have to answer to God for your preaching ministry.  If you think the church needs that passage again, why not preach it again?  What people might think about your ministry or effort is very much a secondary issue.  You can make it clear that you are not trying to sneek a repeat past them.  Tell them upfront that you have preached it before and that you feel before God that we need to think it through again, or some more.

Personally I would be very willing to return to the same text for a second service on the same day.  It allows for deeper levels of application and reinforcement.  I would be willing to return to the same text after a gap of weeks, months or years, too.  Perhaps it helps to think about it this way:

A sermon event consists of several ingredients – the preacher, the listeners, the situation, the text.  When time has passed, the preacher is not the same person they were before.  The listeners have changed (individually, and in respect to who is actually present).  The situation has changed.  The text remains the same, but is engaged by the first three elements in a fresh way.

Same text, different occasion, why not?  Our purpose is not to impress listeners with new information week after week, but to shepherd people before God as under-shepherds . . . sometimes the same patch of grass is what they/we really need!

The Missing Connection

/ Peter Mead / Leave a comment

Sometimes technically solid sermons seem to sputter and struggle.  It’s not unusual for a message to fall flat.  Why is that possible when the pieces are in place?

Content – We know the importance of having good content.  I tend to use the term “Biblical” when I am evaluating a message, others use the term “faithful.”  It’s a matter of content.

Clarity – We probably see it as a self-evident truth that for something to communicate it needs to make sense (although just believing it doesn’t make us automatically clear communicators).  A clear message clearly presented is a blessing to listeners.

Contemporaneity – Ok, so if I wasn’t enjoying my alliteration (might as well do it on here since I rarely alliterate in messages), I might prefer to speak of emphasising the relevance of the passage.  That is, helping listeners to hear what God is saying today, to us, through His Word.

Good content, clearly presented, with a contemporary sense of relevance.  What more could you want in a message?  How can messages with all three ingredients in place still fall flat?

I think there is a fourth ingredient that is often overlooked, frequently forgotten in the mix of making a message that ministers well:

Connection – Again if I weren’t in the mood for “C’s” I would probably call this being engaging.  It is something about the persona of the preacher, the energy, the relevance, the eye contact, the warmth, the humour, the manner of delivery, the feel and flow of the whole, the comfort or nerves of the speaker, and so much more.  It may be hard to pin down what makes it, but as a listener you can sense when it’s missing.

Let’s try to preach good content, clearly, with a contemporary focus.  But as well, let’s seek to connect.  After all, we are communicating for a communicating and relational God.  Preaching is a relational exercise.  And when connection is missing, preaching falls flat.

Arriving at the Destination

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

Just a quick post on something I’ve mentioned before, but worth a revisit.  The best flight is one that has a planned destination, and once arriving there, it lands.  The same is true with preaching.  How easily we can end up planning the landing mid-flight, as we preach!  How tempting it is to pull out during descent to circle around one more time and add in a couple of elements we thought of saying, then forgot.  How uncomfortable to be a passenger on that kind of flight, or in that kind of sermon!

Know where the message is going.  Plan the landing ahead of time.  Perhaps have a final sentence that really nails the message.  Get there.  Say it.  Stop.

I have often been impressed at how Haddon Robinson seems to land his messages with a great sentence and a definite period, rather than waffling and fizzling to a vague finish.  I know I need to keep working on that, so I thought I’d share it here in case you do too!

Review Categories

/ Peter Mead / 2 Comments

Yesterday I wrote about the value of doing a prayerful self-review after preaching.  I’d like to follow up with the categories I use for that kind of review . . . When I am listening to sermons in class, or in a church where I need to review speakers, I tend to use a simple quadrant.  I look for four things, and I look for these in my own preaching.

(1) Is it Biblical? That is, does the message content accurately convey the message of the preaching text, and is it accurate in its representation of the whole of Scripture?

(2) Is it Clear? Does it make sense?  Sad to say too much preaching is actually incoherent in part or in whole.  Does the message have a sense of unity, of order and of progress?

(3) Is it Engaging? This is often missed when preaching is evaluated for faithfulness, clarity and relevance.  Does the speaker and the message engage the heart and not just the mind of the listener?  Is there energy, is there connection?

(4) Is it Relevant? This is not to suggest the preacher has “make the text relevant,” but rather, does the message emphasise the relevance of this passage to us as a congregation?  If we are honest, it is too easy to slip into historical lecture and fail to make evident what God is saying to us, right now, through His Word.

These are the categories of review I use for others, it only makes sense to use them for myself after I preach.  Prayerful reflection on preaching should serve to improve our future preaching.

Post Sermon Review

/ Peter Mead / 3 Comments

The old adage says practice makes perfect.  I have to agree with Haddon Robinson and Howard Hendricks in disputing that.  Practice makes ingrained. Perhaps perfect practice makes perfect, or maybe evaluated and critiqued practice makes perfect.  But if you do something over and over, without constructive improvement, it won’t suddenly become good, it will simply become ingrained and hard to fix.  So after we preach, we need to review.

What should self-review include? I think there is a place for feedback from others and I have written about that on this site.  But in this post I want to dwell on self-review.  There are different ways to do this, but I want to encourage at least a minimalist approach.  Sure, if you can get yourself videoed, then it is a real eye-opener to watch yourself preach.  Perhaps once every now and then this is well worth the pain!  Listening to the audio of a message is worth it periodically, but I wouldn’t suggest suffering through such discomfort every week!

What I do suggest, though, is to prayerfully evaluate after every message.  In the aftermath preachers tend to feel discouraged and overly critical.  However, prayerful gratitude and handing over to God is so worthwhile(especially handing over any excessively painful critique, or especially laudatory affirmation, is very healthy!)  In this prayerful review, the preacher will typically be able to recognise some of the weaknesses in the preaching – perhaps an unclear section, a loss of momentum, an overly used term, etc.  This kind of review will not reveal everything, we need feedback from others to recognize our blindspots.  However, it will prove helpful and can feed into future preaching if we note our observations and prayerfully review them before future preaching.

Tomorrow I will share the categories that I use for reviewing a sermon

Hope You Don’t Mind a Re-Heat

/ Peter Mead / 2 Comments

Sometimes we’ll have a meal that consists of leftovers reheated.  Sometimes this tastes better than the first time it was served.  Anyway, I was looking back at some of the earliest posts on this site and decided to re-heat one that I’ve often thought back on, or even referred to: The Preacher’s Cutting Room

Watching a movie on VHS was simple. Watch it, rewind it, return it. Now we use DVDs – watch it, then watch as many hours of extra bonus material as you can tolerate! You can enjoy “The Making of . . .” and “Meet the cast . . .” and “Humorous gaffes.” Then there is also “Deleted scenes.”

A scene might take days to film, more days to edit, cost thousands of dollars, and then be mercilessly cut from the final edition of the film. One such scene was in the movie Gladiator. As Maximus waited under the Coliseum, he looked out through a barred window to see Christians praying as the lions approached. A powerful scene, very moving. It was cut.

The director’s commentary on the scene explained the situation. It did not help the progress of the plot. It was potentially overwhelming, too weighty.

After many hours of preparing a sermon, get out the scissors. It isn’t easy, but there may be an element of explanation, an illustration, or a story that does not help the message, or may overwhelm it. If it would not be missed, or if its absence would not result in reduced understanding of the message . . . cut it. Perhaps when your sermon is on a DVD you can make it available, but for now we are still preaching in VHS.

I suppose I could try to bring the imagery up-to-date with some reference to Blu-Ray preaching (sharper and clearer?) or 3-D preaching (content doesn’t matter as long as there’s some special effects 🙂  Actually preachers do fall into the latter, don’t we?  Remember the early days of overhead projectors with acetates, or of powerpoint?  Suddenly the technology was exciting and some settled for sermons that simply used it for the sake of it.  Over time, hopefully, preachers learn that tools are servants, but the message still has to be genuinely focused, contentful, well-honed.  I suspect preaching with twitter feedback, and other such contemporary ideas, may become part of preaching in some circles, but will be completely ignored in others. Either way, the preacher will always have a cutting room.

Any time we study God’s Word and prayerfully consider preaching it to others, we will probably end up blessed with more content than is really needed for that specific message from that passage to those people on that occasion.  Don’t dismiss the cuttings, some may be very useful, perhaps reheated in another message, but don’t overpack the sermon either . . . let it be as focused as it should be.

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Extended Gestation

/ Peter Mead / 3 Comments

Somebody has likened (with all the necessary caveats and apologies) preaching to pregnancy.  You know the elements of the analogy: something growing within, the building excitement, that something has to come out at a specific point in time, with the resulting post-delivery tiredness and even sometimes the post-partum blues.

Among other elements where the analogy breaks down, there is one that I’d like us to ponder today.  The length of gestation.  Real pregnancy has a consistency of length, preaching preparation doesn’t.  It is easy to fall into a cycle of preaching preparation, from start to finish, taking only five to six days.  This fits between Sundays, but it creates issues.

Is the message able to fully grow, and specifically, is it able to fully grow and work its way into your life if you’ve only been working on it for five days?  “I’ve been studying this passage for the past few days.  I’ve lived with it since Tuesday, and have been applying it consistently since yesterday morning.  Listen to my powerful message from 24 hours of experience . . . ” We don’t say this when we preach, but sometimes we say it by our lives.

Haddon Robinson suggested using a ten-day preparation cycle.  This means doing some preparatory exegetical work on the Thursday of the previous week.  This give it time to stir in the heart and mind before launching into preparation in the week before preaching.

Some preachers suggest planning a preaching calendar a year in advance, allowing for time to do initial study, ongoing research/collection of information, and personal application.  Some advocate taking a week to do preliminary work on all messages to be preached as part of this process.

What do you do?  How long do you take to allow the message to grow, and to make sure it has time to make a mark on your life, before you commend it to others?

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Logical, Not Mechanical

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

I teach an 8-stage approach to preaching preparation, always emphasising that each stage should be saturated with prayer (avoiding suggesting prayer as a single stage, or suggesting that this is a prayerless process).

The 8 stages are in a logical order. You cannot prepare the message until you’ve worked with the passage (1-4 before 5-8).  You cannot study the passage until you’ve selected it (1 before 2-4).  You cannot determine the idea of the passage until you’ve selected and studied it (1-3 before 4).  You cannot finalise your message idea until you’ve determined your message purpose (5 before 6).  You cannot decide on structure/strategy and details like intro/conclusion/”illustration” until you’ve determined message purpose and main controlling idea (5 and 6 before 7 and 8).

The 8 stages are not in a rigid order. The reality of preaching preparation is much more fluid than these stages might suggest.  Ideas and thoughts come at various times and should be noted rather than rejected.  As much as we should try to study the passage in its own right, we cannot help but tend toward application earlier in the process, and therefore also to thoughts about the message.  We are dynamic and unpredictable creatures, so naturally preparing a message will reflect that.  (I do stand by my suggestion that those learning should learn the more “stilted” approach first, then grow flexible out of a solid foundation.  Also seasoned preachers would do well to periodically follow the process closely.)

The 8 stages do not constitute a machine. The important thing is that we don’t fall into the trap of thinking a logical and ordered process equates to a message machine: feed in a text and just enough time and out pops a fully formed message.  That will feel as ineffective to our listeners as it will to us.  These 8 stages are logical.  You may choose to add in a distinct middle stage of overtly prayerfully analysing the expected listeners before embarking on the latter four stages of message preparation.  You may disagree with the stages and adjust them or increase them.  But what we mustn’t do is become mechanical in our preparation.  It takes time, seemingly unproductive time, to chew on the text.  It takes time, prayerful experience, and eyes fixed on the Lord, for the text and message to be worked out in your life before you speak it out of your own lips.

Follow the process if it is helpful to you, but remember to pray, to dwell, to linger, to process, to chew.

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Where Does Christ Fit?

/ Peter Mead / 2 Comments

When you are preaching the Old Testament, there should always be a radar bleeping in your heart regarding where Christ fits into the message.  Some will suggest that every message must be entirely and purely about Christ, whatever the text was originally intended to convey.  I feel this approach can bring our view of the inspiration of Scripture into disrepute.

Not every Old Testament passage is just about Christ. I know that Jesus took two disciples on a tour of the Old Testament on the road to Emmaus, but I’d also like to point out that that road is only 7 miles long!  We need to recognize that many passages are about humanity responding to the God of the covenant, or about the power of the creator God, or about judgment, etc.  If it is a stretch to make the passage be about Jesus, don’t.  However,

The listeners are always listening to the sermon post-incarnation. Consequently there is a need to make sure we are engaging with the text in light of later revelation.  That doesn’t mean we have to reinterpret the original meaning to be something that it could not have been originally.  But we do have to land the bridge of the message in the contemporary circumstance of our listeners (including the fact that we are post-incarnation, post-cross, post-resurrection, post-Pentecost, etc.)

The Old Testament is, of course, heading toward Christ. It is Christo-telic.  That doesn’t mean it is Christo-exclusive.

May God grant us wisdom as we seek to honour His whole revelation in all its fullness, recognizing the progression of revelation, speaking with absolute relevance to contemporary listeners and always honouring and glorifying the Word incarnate!

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