How to . . . ?

Monological Q and A – part 3

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

All that I’ve written in the last two posts rests on a critical foundation.  In order to preach so that listeners feel engaged and involved, even though they may sit in silence, the preacher has to know the listeners as well as possible.

Relational pastoring requires the preacher to know the people listening.  In your own church you have weeks, months and years to gradually learn about those that listen when you preach.  Yet it is so easy to neglect the relationships because of a commitment to study, or as a protective policy to prevent vulnerability on your part.

As a visiting speaker you may only have twenty minutes before the meeting, and during the singing, to observe and learn all you can about the people to whom you will be speaking.  As limited as it may be, this time is priceless for learning about listeners.  Learn to observe.  Learn to ask questions.

As a visitor, or as an in-house speaker, it is vital to remember the importance of knowing the worlds of your listeners, as well as the world of the biblical text.  A weakness on either side of the chasm will weaken the bridge you build between the two.

Monological Q and A – part 2

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

Yesterday I offered three thoughts on how to make a message that engages the listener.  Even though you are doing all the talking, they don’t feel like observers at a presentation, but participants in a half quiet conversation.  They feel like you’re talking to them, like they are involved as the message progresses.  Relevant preaching, rhetorical questions and related to life outlining of the message were yesterday’s points, here are three more (and why not push the alliteration since I tend not to do so when preaching!)

4. Room to breathe – It’s so easy to rattle through a message that is clear and defined in our notes, but comes across as an unbroken stream to the listener.  Good use of pauses, and even illustrations, can give room to breathe and re-engage.

5. Really clear structure and transitions – The more people know what’s going on, the more they can engage with it.  If they’re trying to figure out what you’re trying to do, or where you are going, the less they are involved and actually listening.  Good clear structuring and transitions will help the listener to participate in the actual content and journey of the message.

6. Resistance to cruise controlled sermon pace – Pace is so critical.  Again, your notes may be clearly structured, but the listener is at your mercy to get a sense of order and progress.  Many now like to short-circuit this by projecting their outline.  Don’t do that, instead learn to make your message really clear.  Structure and transitions matter.  So too does pace.  No interesting journey progresses at a constant pace – either fast or slow.  Variation of pace will help listeners engage.

Any more that you would add?

Monological Q and A

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

My last post on Friday sparked a few comments regarding the possibilities of Q&A with congregations.  There is certainly more to be said for that.  I read an article by a friend wrestling with the biblical tension (for want of a better word), between the need for authoritative presentation of truth (preacher as herald), and the need for engaged relational disciple-making (conversational, relational, mentoring ministry).  We lose so much if we give up one for the other.

While you may want to continue that discussion, and I will return to it at some point, I’d like to address a related matter.  The preacher in a traditional preaching setting still needs to make listeners feel involved.  Pure monologue that leaves listeners feeling like observers of a pre-packaged presentation is less than what it could be.  How can we preach so listeners feel engaged and involved?  A few of many possibilities:

1. Relevant preaching – I suppose this is obvious, but listeners will engage more when a message is relevant to their lives.  That doesn’t mean a heavenly majestic text is trivialised to a silly practical level.  It does mean that the preacher has thought about how the text is relevant to these listeners on this occasion.  The world of the text is earthed in the realities of life.  Then listeners feel involved.

2. Rhetorical questions – Too many can start to sound false, but a well placed rhetorical question only expresses what the listener is thinking.  Their inner dialogue follows right along with the preacher, “yes, I just thought that, here’s my answer, what does the text say to me now?”  That inner dialogue requires skill from the preacher, but it turns monologue into something far richer.

3. Related to life wording – It’s not hard to change the wording of the main idea, and the main points, from historical description of the text (commentary title approach to outlining), to related to us wording (contemporary full sentence statements approach).  Obviously you go back to the text to support what you’re saying, but it drives the message into today, rather than simply offering an historical lecture followed by an applicational team talk in the final moments.

I’ll add three more suggestions tomorrow.  Feel free to pre-empt or offer your insight.

Why Don’t We Have Q and A?

/ Peter Mead / 4 Comments

On Wednesday evening I spoke at a meeting I haven’t visited before.  They asked for a specific subject and so I spoke on that.  They suggested having ten minutes of questions after the message.  These were intelligent and helpful questions.  Hopefully my answers were the same!

So I have two thoughts:

1. Why don’t we create venues for Q&A times? I’ve only heard of a very few churches that have some structure set up for people to interact with the preacher about the message.  I heard of one place where the preacher goes to another room about half an hour after the service and is available for questions about the message.  Why not?  Obviously a Q&A at the end of the service could easily turn deeper communication times into information transfer times to be sabotaged by the curious, but thereby undermining life change for others.  Yet perhaps there is a way to create opportunities for a group to feed off one anothers questions and probe the message further?

But this leads me to a deeper question:

2. Why aren’t there more questions in church? I just spent three days with a group of student ministry leaders . . . major note takers and question askers!  Then the meeting on Wednesday evening – essentially a special interest group.  There are questions in classroom settings and in seminar formats, but in normal church?  Opportunity is already in place in that people can approach the preacher and ask a question, but typically do not.  Is it learned behaviour to not probe the sermon?  Is it a genuine lack of interest?  Or is it just that sense of not coming across as negative or critical?  Perhaps the opporrtunity would generate the interest and desire to probe messages further.  Perhaps for that reason alone we should consider introducing the odd time for Q&A?

Have you tried anything along these lines?  Did it work?  I’d love to hear from other people’s experience.

A Classic Contrast Revisited

/ Peter Mead / 2 Comments

In Between Two Worlds (I Believe in Preaching), John Stott contrasted the typical weakness in more liberal churches from the weakness in the preaching in more conservative churches.  One connected with the audience, but had no rooting in Scripture.  The other started with Scripture and built straight up to heaven, without ever touching down.  Timothy Ward’s book Words of Life revisits this contrast.  Allow me to paraphrase:

Some churches aim to give hope and inspire faith, but do so by proclaiming a Christ different from the Christ presented in the New Testament.  This is achieved by honouring the purpose of a text without being shaped fully by the content.  (Incidentally, this also happens in more conservative churches where a particularly elevated value is given to passion and emotion.)

On the other hand, some churches are driven by content, but seemingly unaware of the purpose for which that content was communicated.  In the more conservative churches there is a tendency to see the preacher as primarily a “Bible teacher.”  True biblical preaching should neither by-pass, nor settle for, faithful exegetical and doctrinal instruction.

Let me quote Ward’s conclusion to the section: “Properly faithful biblical preaching involves the preacher deliberately seeking to fashion every verbal (and indeed physical) aspect of his preaching in such a way that the Spirit may act through his words in the lives of his hearers, ministering the content of Scripture in accordance with the purpose of Scripture.” (p165)

Without wanting to critique Stott’s great book in any way, I have to admit I am really excited by what Ward has done here.  Scripture is not just a repository of truth which the preacher must purposefully land in the lives of the listeners.  The preacher’s task includes sensitivity to the original author’s purpose (or intent) as well as content, which must be effectively and sensitively communicated to the contemporary listeners.  What Stott would probably affirm (and I’m not checking the book, so he may overtly state this), Ward does overtly state.  Preacher, in your passage study, be sure to recognize the author’s intent as well as content.  Then preach so as to appropriately do what the passage did, as well as saying what the passage said.

“The Spirit is again graciously present in the preached message, if what is preached now is faithful in purpose and content to what he once inspired.” (p.165, italics original)

Prayerful Preparation and Prayer

/ Peter Mead / Leave a comment

I strongly resist the notion that learning about homiletics means that your preaching will automatically become professional, fleshly and spiritually cold.  Some do end up there.  Some do become mechanistic in their approach.  But I hold that it is right to be a good steward of the opportunity to develop as a preacher, as long as the process is saturated in prayer, as long as the personal relationship with the Lord doesn’t grow cold and become a thing of the past.

So when I teach a beginners intro to preaching, I always make it abundantly clear that the process I teach is not a machine into which a text is fed and a message emerges at the other end.  The process is a logical approach to developing a message, but it should be pursued in dependence upon the Lord through conversational prayer throughout the process.  Pray as you select a passage, pray as you study it, pray as you identify its purpose and pray as you clarify its main idea.  Pray as you consider who will hear the message, pray as you determine the purpose of the message, etc.

Having said all that, there is still a difference between prayerful preparation and just plain prayer.  Make sure that all your prayer is not running in parallel to preparation so that you fail to spend time with the Lord about the preaching opportunity.  Take time away from your PC, your notes, etc., and make sure you spend time talking to Him about the message, the people, the opportunity, your own heart and motivation in preaching, etc.

Time taken out of preparation to spend in focused prayer before the Lord is not time wasted.  Let’s be sure to prepare prayerfully.  And let’s be sure to pray as part of preparation.  Prayerful.  And prayer.  Both.

Help People Trust Their Bibles

/ Peter Mead / 7 Comments

I was just reading a post by Bill Mounce on the Koinonia blog (to see it click here.)  He offers a simple and graciously toned introduction to textual criticism set in the context of a natural question raised by folks in the church . . . “why is verse 4 missing in my Bible?”

Some textual critical questions would probably only be asked by people already heavily interested in the subject with apparatus in hand.  These kinds of questions may intrigue us, but usually shouldn’t find their way into the pulpit!  However, if people in the pew are looking at their Bible and asking a textual critical question, then we need to offer help.  Just a few brief thoughts in light of Bill’s good post:

1. Textual criticism can be explained relatively simply. People probably don’t need to know about every textual family, how to pronounce homeoteleuton, or the full rationale behind lectio difficilor potior.

2. Textual criticism can be explained with grace. This area of study can really stir up the tension, especially between adherents to different textual families.  Such tensions won’t help if shown from the pulpit.  Be gracious to people who disagree with you on Majority Text vs Critical Text issues.  Often you’d be fighting an unseen opponent anyway since people in the same church often tend to use the same version of the Bible (and most of these without any real understanding of text critical issues underlying the options)!

3. Textual criticism should be explained at the right time. Just because you’re enjoying a textual critical excursion in your personal study, or even in your sermon preparation, doesn’t mean the people are needing a dose of it.  But when a verse is missing and they are wondering, or when you’re going through Mark or John and you get to the square bracket sections, then is probably a good time to offer some explanation.

4. Textual critical explanations should build trust in our English Bibles. This has to be paramount.  What have you gained if you’ve showed off your knowledge, perhaps won a debate against an opponent not present, but undermined the confidence of every listener in their English Bible?

Don’t Rush

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

I’m not referring specifically to the speed of delivery here.  Some of us need to slow down sometimes, others could really do with speeding up slightly, and we all need to be sensitive to the particular listeners before us.

I am referring to the pace of information being offered.  It is easy, especially after studying for many hours, to overload the listeners’ bandwidth.  Listeners need time to process information.  Images take time to form.  Stories take time to tell.  Take the necessary time.

As well as taking the necessary time, be aware of the aural equivalent of optical illusions.  There are things we do that may not speed up the pace the words are emerging, but will give the impression that the information is rushing out:

1. Mini illustrations, quotes and anecdotes. It is easy to jump through illustrations really quickly.  It may work, or it may overwhelm the bandwidth.

2. Piling up Biblical illustrations. It is so easy to jump in and out of a biblical book, then another, and another.  All the while you are seeking to underline the point of the main passage, but listeners can easily feel overwhelmed with unfamiliar contexts and content (even if they know the contexts, it still takes mental effort to process a passing illustration).

3. Key explanations unrestated. It is easy to make a vital connection.  I was just listening to a sermon where a key, critical, vital connection was made in the space of a handful of words.  “Here xyz means jkl.”  It was a link that required some backing up and explanation.  It slipped by and the next five minutes I was struggling to listen because I didn’t get the four-word sentence (I understood the sentence, but couldn’t see how he got there from that verse).

4. Transitions. While it is possible to drive quickly down the straight road, we need to slow down through corners.  Transitioning between one point and the next is a critical moment in the message, but it is so easy to fly through the bends.

5. Multiple purposes. If you are trying to achieve too many things, the message will feel choppy and disconnected.  When listeners can’t follow the flow that comes from unity of purpose, they will feel like the message is firing in multiple directions and therefore struggle to take it all in (in fact, they won’t, they’ll reprocess for unity and probably make the main thing the most compelling illustration or story used!)

Let’s beware of things we may do that give the sense of being too fast.  Allow listeners enough time in the passage you’re preaching to let it soak down into their lives and saturate their hearts.

Going Deeper Than Instruction

/ Peter Mead / 2 Comments

In a lot of preaching situations it is easier to simply present the text and press home the imperatives.  Whether or not there is technically an imperative in the grammar, we can easily turn a passage into an instruction and press for change through our words.

I wonder how often we miss the opportunity to go a step or two deeper and recognize the “why” behind the “should”?  Typically the epistles offer lists of instructions, but in the context of the letter, these instructions are very much set in the context of theological truth.  We are to present our bodies as living sacrifices, but it is in view of God’s mercies that we are to do so.  We are to walk in a manner worthy, but specifically it’s in a manner worthy of the calling we have received.  We are to set our hearts on things above, where Christ is, but this is in light of the Christ presented in the first two chapters.

Instruction and imperative don’t just sit on their own as burdens to place on people, but as appropriate response to the captivating truths of who God is, what He has done and so on.

As a preacher it is much easier to simply give instruction and apply pressure, but we must consider how to make sense of those instructions so that instead of pressured compliance, we might see captivated response.

Don’t Skip A Step

/ Peter Mead / 2 Comments

A missed step jars.  Try to accompany someone singing who misses a beat.  Try a choreographed dance but miss a step.  Next time you’re figure skating in the Olympics, miss a step before going for your quad.  Ok, these examples are getting slightly less likely, but what about in preaching?  I suppose there are a lot of steps that can be skipped to the detriment of our preaching, both in preparation and in delivery.  Here’s one:

You explain a particular text.  It sets out some clear expectations of how we should be living in response to God – perhaps instruction, perhaps command.  Application is clear, so you present it.  But in doing so it is obvious that some or many listeners would have fallen short of this in their experience.  Perhaps the demands relate to morality, purity, relationship, thought-life, etc.  (It should go without saying that you recognized people might feel convicted before delivering the message.)  So since some or all listeners have already fallen short of the application of this text you reassure people of God’s love and grace.

Hold on.  Missed a step.  Too often, perhaps in this generation in particular, it is easy to preach comfortable messages and avoid the discomforting but vital step of calling for repentance.  Are people helped by being reassured of God’s grace without also being urged to repent?  If God is a relationally jealous God, and we have been adulterous and unfaithful to Him, then is it enough to have feelings placated by assurances of His goodness?  Surely a jealous lover’s goodness is little comfort to an unfaithful spouse unresponsive to the necessary conviction for sin?

It may be harder to preach, but giving people opportunity to repent, reminder to respond, must be a necessary step in some sermons.