How to . . . ?

Preview for Clarity

/ Peter Mead / Leave a comment

Some people like to take the complexity and intricacy of preaching and turn it into a one-size fits all template.  This is unfortunate because preaching has so many variables to be enjoyed and utilized.  Take, for instance, the preview.  As part of the introduction to a  message, the preacher may choose to give an outline of what is to follow, thus giving a sense of direction, of structure, of purpose, of intent.  Here are some preview options:

1. Specifically outline all the points. This would be a deductive preaching approach for the purist.  What it loses in intrigue and interest, it adds in clarity and precision.  It helps the listener know what is coming, how many points, how they relate to one another and to the text.  But recognize that clarity isn’t the only strength to pursue in a message.  Remember that interest and intrigue are also important.  A strongly deductive outline for the whole message will be helped by an inductive approach within each point.  While the whole may be clearly previewed, the points will be helped by offering only part of the package, leaving something to be developed for the interest of the listener.

2. Structurally outline the passage’s flow of thought. Instead of giving your whole outline at the start, sometimes it is very effective to simply overview the chunks.  I heard a very effective message recently that used this approach.  By no means an exact quote: “In the first ten verses Paul shows it does mean to stick with Christ, then in the last six verses what it doesn’t mean to stick with Christ.”  Simple.  Clear.  Listener’s familiarised with the terrain and ready to press into the details.  Sometimes this kind of simplified preview prepares listeners for more detail without overwhelming them in advance.

3. Outline within the points. In a more inductive sermon, the preview by necessity is more restricted.  Instead of giving the full idea (subject and complement) and outline of the message, a message preview might give just the subject and maybe a super-simplified sense of the text’s shape or purposein order to assure the listener that the full idea will be achieved in the course of the message.  In such cases it may work well to use previewing during the message as a new point or movement is introduced.  While not giving away the whole, it does satisfy the listener’s desire for direction.  So perhaps the solution to the stated problem is still to come, but in the first movement of the message a false solution will be presented and found wanting – this could be clearly previewed without undermining the inductive nature of the message.

There are other approaches to previewing a message too.  The important thing is to deliberately include a preview that will most help the listeners as they receive this particular message.  No one size fits all, but custom made previews crafted for a unique combination of text and listeners.

Pre-Sermon Review – A Strange Idea?

/ Peter Mead / 2 Comments

I don’t know of many churches that require it, but I do see many that should consider it. Too often we leave the preacher in a very lonely spot as far as preaching is concerned.  The sermon is prepared and delivered, and then everyone gets to think and evaluate and critique and respond and so on.  But it is too late if something is omitted that is vital, or included that is misleading, or misspoken that is heretical.

I know of one church that requires whichever staff member is preaching to present their sermon outline and content at a breakfast meeting a couple of days before delivery.  It allows for interaction, input, critique, and all that before it does any damage, or misses an opportunity, with the gathered folks on the Sunday.

If your church has a “staff” that are paid to work together during the week, this should be a no-brainer.  But for the many more churches where the workers work elsewhere during the week, the decision to bring a few together ahead of the Sunday is a big decision.  But if we believe in the importance of preaching the Word, then surely it is a decision worth considering seriously.

Preaching is about relationship.  It is about communication.  God’s Word to humanity presented by a human in the power of the Spirit that collectively and individually we might have the opportunity to respond to Him, both for salvation and for spiritual growth.  Preaching involves relationship between speaker and listeners (a good speaker knows it is not mere monologue, irrespective of whether they choose to have verbal participation from the listeners).  Preaching is relational, but we so easily make preaching a solo exercise.  Doesn’t really make sense.

What To Do With Extra Material?

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

A couple of years ago I wrote about the preacher’s cutting room.  It is normal to finish a sermon and have material left over, content that was not shared.  If we are honest, some of it was not shared because it was not worth sharing, or because it might cause an unnecessary stir.  But some material is good material.  What to do with it?

1. File it for a future message. This is particularly the case with illustrative material that could be adapted and used at another time.  The key here is to have a filing system that will allow you to retrieve it when you need it.  The other piece that fits in this category is exegetical notes on the passage that may be useful next time the passage is preached – so of course it is worth compiling and filing a set of exegetical notes (I presume you do this with every passage you study?)

2. Preach a Second Sermon. If the schedule and setting allows it, I am a big fan of the idea of preaching a second sermon on the same text.  We so easily move on without taking time for things to sink in, but a second sermon on the same text would allow for reviewing the main content, and for development and reinforcement of application (which often can get short-changed if you do a good job of explaining the text in the first sermon).  Churches with a morning and evening service would do well to consider this approach.

3. Have a Q&A or interaction session of some kind. Perhaps a Q&A session, or a smaller group setting for those who want to interact about the sermon.  I’ve heard of these kind of things, but wonder how this is not adding another meeting to typically overloaded church schedules.

4. Post Out Takes Online? I wonder if anyone has tried this approach?  Using facebook or a blog, it would be easy for a preacher to follow up a message with a handful of sermon pieces that were omitted for the Sunday, but could then provide a venue for people in the church to follow up the sermon and interact with it and with each other online.  I like this idea, anyone do something similar and able to share your experience?

5. Podcast the Out Takes? Similar to above, but why not record a few minutes of reflection and get those online within a day or so.  This would also allow opportunity to respond to any questions that have been asked (perhaps clarifying something or helping with any misunderstanding that became clear from feedback received).

Any other suggestions?  I preached last Sunday and could easily have shared a further 10-15 minutes of material if either an online blog or pod system were in place.  I’m really intrigued to know if anyone has experience to share with us . . .

Guest Post – On Re-Using Old Material

/ Peter Mead / Leave a comment

Here’s an email I received from John Bell.  I asked if I could simply include it here as a guest post and he kindly agreed:

Dear Peter –

Thanks for responding to these things. I really appreciate your thoughts.

Your comments about using others’ thoughts in our own preaching are very helpful. I particularly like your suggestion of how to express that I’m building on ideas that I’ve heard from others that have profoundly affected me. Something so brief and general can communicate what needs to be said.

Whenever we preach, no matter where the material comes from, I would hold up three standards:

– Do I have the active conviction that this message makes central the main point of the text?

– Does the main point of the text have a hold of my heart, mind, and life?

– Does the message I preach flow from these two things?

It seems that these three issues are more important than where the ideas, words, or illustrations come from. For example, if I dust off a sermon I preached a while ago, I have to wrestle with it until these three things are true again. Perhaps the old wording and illustrations will work again, and perhaps they will not. I have to work at it until they capture me again, or until I find something else that does. I remember hearing Haddon Robinson say that it can take as much time to preach effectively again an old sermon as it does to develop a new one. To say what once had a hold of my heart will not be much different than saying what once had a hold on someone else’s heart. It will not speak with the same authority as one speaking with the authority of God and His Word.

So I agree that to attempt to bypass this work of study and this work of being ‘captured’ by the text is not the path for speaking as one speaking the very words of God.

Thanks for the challenge to take up the good work of preparing oneself truly to be a minister of God’s Word!

— John

An Idea – Discuss: Permissible Plagiarism?

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Another suggestion was made in reference to Monday’s post.  Let me quote John’s suggestion in full:

‘Appropriate re-use’ of others’ ideas. Of course the question is what ‘appropriate re-use’ might mean, but if I’ve heard a sermon on a passage that was very effective and faithful to the text, or I’ve read a commentary that powerfully and faithfully expressed the message of the text, certainly there must be ways to build on this work with integrity rather than having to ‘start from scratch.’ Any thoughts?

Many thoughts, but what to say?  I agree that it seems unwise to re-invent the wheel, but at the same time there is a danger inherent in trafficking in unlearned truth. I think that it is vital to have time lag in preparation, which is exactly what is missing when people are most tempting to plagiarize.  If a message is particularly striking and well done, then why not take notes, evaluate what made it effective, wrestle with the text in light of that preacher’s chosen approach.  But then there needs to be time in order to work through the sermon for yourself.  You need to submit your life to the text, and allow the message to become your own, even if a particularly well-turned phrase, or effective and faithful sermon structure reflects the work of another.

Then there is the matter of attributing sources. We need to think through the side effects of citing sources when we preach – people may feel turned off by names of folks they don’t know, or by people they do know of and disagree with.  People may feel you are showing off, or that your access to “scholars” puts you in a different league to them and thereby demotivate them from studying the Word for themselves.  If something needs to be attributed to someone else, it is possible to do that without citing names and details.  “One preacher I heard put it this way. . . ” can be all it takes to move you from plagiarism to personal integrity.  (People can always ask for specific citations after the sermon.)

Check your motives.  You can go to all sorts of lengths to hide another preacher’s work in your sermon.  But if you are going “to lengths” then something isn’t right.  The question is not what can you get away with, but what is right as you preach as one who will give an answer to the Lord? Your motives will usually be most compromised when you feel most desperate for a breakthrough before a looming deadline.

I acknowledge that others will influence our preaching, and they should.  But it should be a “they” and not just one person.  It should still be us that preaches, and not a poor clone of another.  We should be above reproach, but equally we should be open to learn from others who are perhaps better students of the Word or preachers than ourselves.  So much more to say, but that’s enough from me for now . . . feel free to comment.

When Time is Short

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A good friend wrote the following:

As I anticipate teaching preaching overseas, I realize that I need to take seriously the lack of time that these pastors have for sermon prep. I feel like my training has prepared me well both to practice and to teach a strategy for preaching that requires quite a bit of time, and many western pastors have that luxury. My students will not.  Any suggestions?

I’ve seen this in many places, as well as in teaching bi-vocational preachers in the west.  How can the preaching process take less time without compromising what matters?  Where can the time be trimmed, without compromising the end product?  Here are some possibilities:

Remove the Passage Selection Headache.  Encouraging them to plan a series (typically through a book), allows study to overlap and build, and it takes away the stress of finding a passage from scratch every week.

Encourage preachers to preach one thing well, not to preach everything in one. Most people feel that preaching should be both an exhausting process and an exhaustive presentation of every exegetical detail in a text – so in some ways teaching them to preach is about teaching them what is not preaching, even though they have heard it every Sunday from others.

Remove pressure to discover endless clever illustrations. I’ve tried to remove pressure to chase quotable illustrations, encouraging good handling of, and effective descriptive of the text (so that if they explain a text, or tell the story well, summarize the main point and apply it specifically, they can feel like they are really preaching).

The default starting point for a narrative sermon outline is helpful.  I find giving a simple default outline for narratives to be helpful (so they aren’t scratching their heads about outline when it often can be as simple as tell the story, clarify the main point and then apply it.)

Recycle Bible study.  If people are preaching twice in a weekend, I encourage preaching twice off the back of one set of exegesis (that is, go back to the same passage and apply it further or chase issues in a different way).

Preaching to Youth

/ Peter Mead / 3 Comments

I received an email from Peter who was asking about preaching to youth.  Now I don’t know the setting of that message, the age of the youth, their culture, etc.  So my response has to be non-specific, and honestly, more focused on my cultures (US/UK).  Nevertheless, here are some thoughts, perhaps you could add others:

1. Be engaging,  don’t be silly.  Some people think youth can’t concentrate or don’t want meat, so they just act silly and try to entertain.  Youth are very capable of concentrating and value good quality content.  But if it is boring (as with adults), they will disengage.  So engage rather than entertain (although if you are humorous then don’t be afraid to use it).

2. This generation values meat.  When I think of who the popular  speakers are today among the younger generation, the names that come to mind are not entertainers.  Notice how younger folks flock to hear people like Tim Keller, John Piper, Mark Driscoll, DA Carson . . . which proves that the younger generation are not lightweight.

3. Recognize that you are speaking cross-culturally. You may be only 15 years older than them, and from the same place, but you are effectively preaching to a different culture.  It is good to think about their worldview, their values, their language, etc.  Don’t try to be one of them (too many try to act like a youth and have no credibility as a result), but do try to know who you are speaking to.

4. Don’t be longer than necessary, but know that concentration spans are as short as ever. That is to say, don’t think 15 or 20 or 30 minutes is the key.  The key is 3-5 minutes.  You can preach for an hour in some settings, but actually that has to be a series of 3-5 minute sections that grab and retain attention.

5. The younger generation value authenticity more than previous generations. Don’t make yourself out to be a total idiot, but do be real with your own struggles and life.  They don’t value polished rhetoric and a pulpit persona, they do value genuine and authentic communication from the heart and the head, to the heart and the head.

Borrowed Light

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Thielicke, speak to us about Spurgeon . . .

For Spurgeon the really determinative foundation of the education of preachers was naturally this work on the spiritual man.  The education of preachers must not be directly pragmatic; it must not be immediately directed to preaching as its goal.  Otherwise the process of education becomes an act of mere training, the teaching of technical skills.  The preacher must read the Bible without asking in the back of his mind how he can capitalize homiletically upon the text he studies.  He must first read it as nourishment for his own soul.

This is vitally important, but easily neglected or misunderstood.  Too often homiletics is treated as a subject that fits only in some sort of pragmatic department of training institutions, somehow distinct from Bible, Theology, Spirituality, Divinity.  How wrong to view homiletics as the mere teaching of teachnique – tips for public speaking.  While there is real value in training in the skills of passage study, sermon formation and delivery, homiletics is so much more.  Ultimately the educator is not to teach a man to preach, but to teach a man, and to teach him to preach. (Adapt that sentence as you prefer for gender neutrality, but it simply doesn’t work to make that gender neutral by pluralising the terms.)  True biblical preaching is born out of the spiritual reality in the preacher, not just some assemblage of tips and techniques.  Let’s go back to Thielicke, this next part is priceless:

For the light which we are to let shine before men is borrowed light, a mere reflection.  He who will not go out in the sun in order to play the humble role of a mirror, reflecting the sun’s light, has to try to produce his own light, and thus gives the lie to his message by his vanity and egocentric presumption.  Besides becoming unworthy of being believed, he is condemned to consume his own substance and expend his capital to the point of bankruptcy.  Because he is not a recipient, he must himself produce and seek to overcome the empty silence within him by means of noisy gongs and clanging cymbals.  Thus he ends in the paralysis of emptiness, and his empty, droning rhetoric merely covers up the burned-out slag underneath. (p10)

Selah.

Some Thoughts on Preparing to Preach Psalm 22

/ Peter Mead / 2 Comments
This is not a complete post, but it may be helpful.  I received the following question from a good friend:

I have been asked to preach on psalm 22 and am at the moment soaking myself in it to try and make sure I understand the message, the structure and what God was saying then and is saying now.

I will resist the temptation to jump straight to Matthew 27 and end up preaching that, as the psalm should, in my current view, stand on its own merits.  Nevertheless I can’t imagine preaching this without bringing in Matthew.  I would really welcome your views on how to approach this to get the balance right.

Here’s my initial answer:

This is a key issue in preaching OT.  Many automatically go to the NT, especially from a passage like that.  I suppose I would study it in two stages – first what it meant then, then how Matthew / Jesus uses it (raising the issue of whether Jesus was pulling only specific verses or relating to the whole of it by quoting the start of it).

In terms of preaching it, I would probably want to preach it in terms of David first, for a significant chunk of the message, recognizing that everyone else is probably thinking of Jesus.  Then going to Jesus and showing his use of it would be perfectly legitimate, thinking about how it applies to us as a text, as well as how Jesus’ application of it applies to us.  I preached it a few years ago and found it effective to major on Psalm 22 at 1000BC, with a smaller focus given to Greater Son of David at 32AD, connecting it to us throughout (application of the concept or main idea in reference to David, and response to Jesus in reference to the latter part of the message).

The one thing I would add is that the psalm is not finished 2/3rds of the way through, as some preachers sometimes seem to think.  In your study you should probably wrestle with the issue of whether this was a purely predictive text (i.e.not of David, but all of Jesus), a double fulfillment type of text (sensus plenior in some respect – i.e. both of David and of Jesus), or a purely descriptive text that Jesus appropriated as appropriate to his situation and response to it (i.e. all of David, but Jesus could identify).  I wouldn’t address all these in the sermon, but I would preach according to my understanding of how the two relate.

There’s a lot to think about with this passage, and I haven’t got into any details here!  Hope you can really delight in the study of it.

When Order Matters

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

Sometimes the points in a message can be given in any order.  Sometimes order matters.

1. When wrong order of content loses listeners

I remember Don Sunukjian explaining how in preaching, because we increase the time taken to explain the elements of a sentence, we sometimes need to reverse the order.  For example, I can say “Let’s go to the store, to buy some dog food, because Rusty is hungry.”  The hearer can hold on to the first two pieces of information while awaiting the reason behind it all.  But if I “preach” that sentence and expand each element, then the order has to be reversed.

“Let’s go to the store.  By store I don’t mean a place where things are kept, so much as a place where things are kept in order for visitors to peruse and purchase.  Now in contemporary society there are many different kinds of store – from the convenience store to the supermarket to the wholesaler to the Swedish furniture warehouse.  Each serves its own purpose, and while some may be controversial when they open in an area . . . ” etc.

To go from extended explanation of stores to an extended explanation of foods, and foods prepared for canine pets in particular, would be overwhelming and irrelevant if listeners didn’t know already that your pet dog Rusty needed food.

Sometimes order of content matters.

2. When wrong order of content changes the message.

In simple terms it is easy to preach the result of salvation first and communicate that salvation is by good works.

It is easily done.  For example, we assume a starting point, then state what is really point two, but it comes across as point one.  So, if we are captivated by a love relationship with Christ (point 1), then our priorities will reflect that and our behavior will be changed (point 2), and consequently our lives will be lived in the blessing of the “shalom” that comes from ordering our lives according to the orders of the God of order (point 3, to inadvertently quote a Stuart Briscoe message I heard twenty years ago.)  So easily we presume point 1 and instead preach points 2 then 3, which leads to preaching legalism rather than the gospel.

I’ll leave it there for now, but next time you structure a message, think through whether the order matters, and whether you have the correct order.