Saturday “Short” Thought: Thesaurus Needed

February 18, 2012February 18, 2012 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

These last weeks I have been blogging about preaching story – a vital skill in preaching, and sadly too easily neglected (either by avoidance of narrative sections, or by preaching as if they weren’t narrative.) In Cor Deo this week we were looking at a monumental passage in the Gospels – John 5.

John is at the same time both the easiest writing to follow (thinking in terms of the Greek especially), and some of the most profound content to grasp. What makes him “easy” to read includes his consistent use of recurring terminology, but this doesn’t make it easy to hear read.

For example, think of the places where Jesus gets going with a “me in you and you in me and us in them that the world may know…” rhythm. Easy words, but not easy to hear read and make sense of it though. Or the example this week in John 5 where Jesus uses the term “witness” about ten times in one paragraph. Even the more formal translation committees were probably relieved to offer two glosses for some variation – witness and testimony.

So what happens when the listeners hear such overwhelming repetition? Do they track with it, or do they roll their eyes and start to wonder when in church history the thesaurus was invented?

In the Gospels Jesus had continual run-ins with a “city gate legal system” over everything from Sabbath misdemeanours to blasphemy. In that system anybody of standing could initiate proceedings, but this didn’t mean constant frivolous charges. So the Jews were not longing for an official trial. They were looking for a charge that would stick, followed by the witnesses to make the charge stick. In that system the key issue in prosecution was not so much the evidence (forget CSI), but the credibility and social standing of the witnesses.

So Jesus made a claim to equality with the Father. That was a more serious charge (blasphemy) than the preceding sabbath breaking charge. Now, witnesses. They had their human witnesses, but what about Jesus, who could he call on? How about the Father, and John the Baptist, and the works themselves, indeed the very word of the Father, speaking of which, how about the Scriptures, Moses? Witness, witness, witness, witness, witness, witness, witness!

They didn’t get a conviction that day. The chess game continued.

So what does this mean for the preacher? Somehow you need to orient the listeners to the culture, the situation, the motivation, etc, and then they can hear the text singing instead of grating. Whether you read it straight through or in bits with explanation, well that is a matter of preaching strategy, but please don’t just read it so their eyes are rolling and they look down on the writing ability of John and the Spirit!

_______________________________________

Next week: I’m enjoying this too much, so how about a record breaking series extension?

Preaching Narratives – I’ll look at some of the issues in different parts of the Bible and even suggest that narrative might be in a class of its own as a super-genre!

Top 10 Mistakes Preachers Make Preaching Story – Part 2

February 17, 2012February 17, 2012 / Peter Mead / 2 Comments

Yesterday I offered five common mistakes made in the preaching of Bible story, let’s finish the list:

6. They come up with a list of “principles.” A story isn’t given in Scripture to make masses of points (some preachers see launch points for pet thoughts throughout a story). To nuance this error further, stories aren’t given in Scripture in order to offer seven principles for a successful business venture, successful pet ownership or successful anything else. This is not some ancient text currently in vogue because of its timeless wisdom for living life. It is a story about people living under the question mark of God’s Word to a fallen world – will they trust Him, or not? Will we?

7. They make it into a human level story – be good, be better, be like. Don’t be blind! The Bible is not just about humanity. There’s a constant theocentric, christotelic, eternal and heavenly dimension. Whether God is overtly stated or not, the Bible story you are reading is written with at least an implicit assumption that these characters are living their lives, making their choices, facing their struggles in the context of response to God. Preach the story theocentrically, not anthropocentrically (i.e. it is God that is the main character, not just a human).

8. They treat it as a context-less moral lesson. Okay, I’m repeating the moral lesson bit to make a point, but actually the error here is to miss the context of the story. Not only does it have a historical context, which the preacher must plumb to make sense of it and preach it well, but it also has a written context. Why did the author choose to put it here in this sequence? It is both historically accurate and artistically presented to convey a theological point. You typically need to observe context to spot this.

9. They don’t apply the main idea of the story. Either they apply every sub-idea along the way, or they don’t apply at all. Stories mark and change lives. Help listeners to see what that might look like as the story preached is translated into their life lived. Never assume people will take general truths and apply them specifically. Never assume that application is automatic. Never believe that positive statements of gratitude from listeners equate to application. Instead, be overt and be specific.

10. They avoid preaching it altogether and stick in discourse sections. This is a mistake. Maybe they think stories are for children, or they think stories aren’t theologically rich enough, or they think that churches only need to be fed the food of epistolary discourse, or they think that they aren’t any good at preaching story, or for whatever reason, they avoid preaching story. This means somewhere between 50-70% of the Bible will remain unpreached in their ministry. I think it was Tozer who said that nothing less than a whole Bible can make a whole Christian.

There are lots of other things that could probably be listed, some of which are specific to certain sections of narrative. But let me make the unstated assumption stated – stories are good for preaching, good for listeners and good for the church. Go for it, preach stories and preach them well!

Top 10 Mistakes Preachers Make Preaching Story

February 16, 2012February 13, 2012 / Peter Mead / 8 Comments

As we come toward the end of this series of posts on preaching Biblical narratives, let’s have a list post (they’re always popular!) How about the top 10 mistakes preachers make when preaching stories?

1. They don’t tell the story! They refer to it, they draw lessons from it, they theologize all over it, but they omit to actually tell the story. Big oops! The story is not there to be exhibit A in your demonstration of your theological acumen. The story is there to change lives, so tell it!

2. They don’t tell it well. I don’t like adding to the sin lists already in existence, but making God’s Word boring or telling a story poorly must surely qualify as a transgression or iniquity on some level. God has given us everything necessary for a compelling message – tension, characters, movement, progression, illustrative materials, interest, etc. To tell it poorly is to miss an open goal with the ball placed carefully at our feet and thirty minutes to take a shot!

3. They think their thoughts are better than God’s inspired text. I’ve blogged before about the nightmare I suffered when a preacher read the story of Jesus turning water into wine, then said, “you know the story, so I won’t tell it again…” then proceeded to offer us his fanciful imposition of a theological superstructure all over the text. The text is inspired, it is great, God is a great communicator (so please don’t think God is desperate for you to add a good dose of your ideas to His – please preach the Word!)

4. They spiritualise details into new-fangled meanings. Suddenly listeners start thinking to themselves, “I never would have seen that!” or “I never would have made that connection – the donkey represents midweek ministries, brilliant!” Actually, they never would have seen it without you, not because you are God’s gift to the church, but because your fanciful insertion simply isn’t there. Preach the text in such a way as to honour it, not abuse it. And can I be provocative? Sometimes people force Christ into passages in ways that seem to undermine the whole richness of the text in its context – just because it is Christ doesn’t make it right.

5. They don’t let every detail feed into the powerful point of the main idea. Every detail counts, but it counts as part of the writer’s strategy to communicate the main point of the story. A story doesn’t make lots of points, it makes one point. Develop a sensitivity to the role of details in the communication of the single plot point.

Tomorrow I’ll finish the list with another five…

Saturday Short Thought: What Do Stories Do?

February 11, 2012February 9, 2012 / Peter Mead / 1 Comment

This week I have been sleeplessly enjoying Daddy-daughter time with Kaylah. It won’t be long before a well told story will engage her imagination, captivate her attention and shape her life. What begins in the toddler years doesn’t end. Stories are not just for children, but can continue to transform lives of all ages.

Steve Mathewson explains what good stories do:

Proclaiming a well-studied story in a well-prepared way will do what good stories intend to do: sneak past the listener’s defenses to penetrate the heart.

And I suppose this is painfully obvious, so please excuse my fatigued new-Dad-again state, but what we need to do as preachers is understand the stories we preach as well as possible, shape our messages as well as possible and then present our messages (including telling the stories) as well as possible.

Let’s hear a bit more from Steve Mathewson’s great book on preaching Old Testament Narrative (p157):

“Stories move. They have tension, movement, interaction, emotion. We cannot tell a story while standing like a four-storey building. We need to consider motion, body language, and emotion in voice, face and gesture. Consider how to physically and subtly represent the movement of the story on the platform. Don’t get stuck behind the pulpit (Spurgeon called it a “coward’s castle!”) Always point to Goliath in the same direction, generally let time flow from left to right from their perspective, etc. Stories move. Good storytellers generally do too. And the best storytellers move physically, in large gesture and with clear expressions in a way that is consistently natural! Being natural takes work!

Next week I want to probe preaching narrative a bit more. For the most profuse genre in the Bible, my sense is that it doesn’t get the attention it deserves in many pulpit ministries.

The Bible Story – Preached with Power

February 10, 2012February 7, 2012 / Peter Mead / 3 Comments

The Bible story you are looking at was inspired by God. Not only did He inspire the content, but He also inspired the form. God felt that having that truth clothed in the genre of story was the best option. Now you have the opportunity to preach it. How can you preach that story with maximum power?

1. Be sure to grasp and preach the main point. A story does not consist of details collected together to offer you numerous launch points for vaguely connected ideas and insights. The story consists of details deliberately chosen to help make the story work, to make the main point effective. Be sure to grapple with the main point more than you hunt for “preaching points.”

2. Be careful to honour the form as well as the content. Why chop it up and preach it as discourse when God made it a story? This means that the bulk of your message should involve the best retelling of the story that you can manage. Speaking of which, two critical elements of powerful story preaching:

3. Put your energy into effective description. Study hard so you can describe well. Build your sensory descriptive vocabulary so you can describe effectively. Read C.S.Lewis or another great fiction writer to get a taste of compelling description. Turn on your imagination again, because if you can see it, they will see it. Take enough time for your descriptions to form on the screens in the listeners’ minds. And pour similar energy into describing the application of your message too. Speaking of energy…

4. Present with energy through engaging dynamism. To be blunt, people don’t listen to dull stories. To be honest, we rarely tell dull stories in normal life. Ask me about my littlest girl’s birth last week and I’ll be engagingly dynamic. I need to let that version of me show when I preach a Bible story. When you preach a Bible story, remember that if you really care so it shows, they will care too.

I think these four suggestions are the very essence of powerfully preaching a Bible story. What would you add?

The Bible Story – Plots in Plot

February 9, 2012February 7, 2012 / Peter Mead / 1 Comment

We tend to be trained, both by Sunday school instruction and by NIV section headings, to separate out each individual story and treat it as a stand alone. But the Bible always presents plots in the context of larger plots.

I’ve been trying to get hold of a commentary series on the books of Samuel that does a stunning job of demonstrating the interconnectedness of the individual stories (a rarity in commentaries on narrative books!)

I’ve been pondering how the gospel writers wove together events and parables in a way that honoured their historicity, yet communicated their own theological emphases under the inspiration of God. The gospels are not simply four perspectives on a car accident, it’s much richer than that!

So as we engage a story, we must break open the blinkers of the section headings and get a sense of what is going on around our focus text. The context almost always sheds light on the point of our focus.

What is true on a local level, is also true on a macro level. To be effective preachers, we need to be whole Bible people. That is, we need to have a sense of how the whole fits together, not just historically, but as a greater plot.

The tension underlying every narrative is the fall of Genesis 3. The characters in every plot are people responding to God as they hear His Word. The resolution to the problem of Genesis 3 can never be the moral successes of particular characters, but rather the amazing intervention of God’s grace incarnated.

While we don’t need to always finish the macro story, we must always be aware of how our particular text fits into that larger narrative. Only then can we be sure to avoid the simplistic little niceties of sharing tips for successful living through ancient tales with moral morals. For whether we realize it or not, how we live this Thursday is part of the great narrative of God’s grace being spurned or celebrated in the epic of history and the annals of eternity.

So on a book by book level, on a canon-wide level, and on a history as a whole level, we must see individual plots as part of the bigger plot of God’s great story. As preachers we have the privilege of shining light both in narrow focus, and in broad illumination.

The Bible Story – People in Plots

February 8, 2012February 7, 2012 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

Whether we are looking at a parable, an event in the life of Christ, an historical portrayal in the inspired account of a Patriarch or the early church, Bible stories are about people in plot.

Plot – the skeleton of every story, both fictional and historic, is the plot. Every story has a plot, for without one it wouldn’t be a story. At its most simple, a plot consists in a tension eventually resolved. A tension is created in the context of an imaginable situation. Somehow that tension is then resolved, or left uncomfortably unresolved in some examples. Our primary task as we interpret a story is to grapple with its main point, as it grapples with us, and that main point will be tied into the resolution to the tension (or a comment on it).

People – every story has characters, and those characters are people (either in human form, or sometimes personified). People engage us, for we too, are people. So we identify with one character, but disassociate from another. We can’t help ourselves. Well told story will always engage us, whether it is from the cinematographer’s projector, or from the pulpit.

In – here’s the key word, in. The characters are in real life situations, living in response to a real God. We listeners find ourselves in their shoes, and they in ours. We enter into stories. Stories enter into us. We live life in stories, and every decision we make, we make in response to our God – how we view Him, how we perceive His love toward us, etc. Every story of our week is somehow shaped by how we have been captured by the story of our God entering in to the story of humanity.

If we view Bible stories as mere illustrative material, then we are blinded, not only to the richness of God’s Word, but also to the reality of God’s world in which we live.

Saturday Short Thought: Fresh Over Abundance from a Can

February 4, 2012February 4, 2012 / Peter Mead / 3 Comments

This week the blog has been pondering issues of recycling sermonic materials and also recycling other peoples’ materials. Meanwhile we’ve welcomed a healthy baby daughter into our home and we are both thankful to our gracious Lord and very tired! So just a short thought to finish off the week.

I understand the challenge faced by many preachers with other work commitments and family priorities. I understand the feeling that some express, namely, that without borrowing the outlines and sermons of other preachers from the internet, they would never be able to preach a sermon on a Sunday.

Just as we close the week out, I’d like to offer an encouragement. Even if you are limited for time and feel unable to do the work of fully developing a sermon for your listeners, consider not taking the short-cut of outline borrowing or sermon lifting. Even if you are only able to develop what feels like an inadequate sermon for Sunday, try it anyway (how about next week?)

I suspect your listeners would prefer to feed on the real food of your Bible study in preparation than the canned contents of some internet repository. Your intro may be weak, your conclusion may be unsophisticated, your illustrations may be lacking, your outline may be undeveloped and your main idea might be just plain, well, plain.

But if your heart has engaged with God’s in prayer for theirs, and you have spent time with the Lord pondering how to present this text with relevance emphasised, then your listeners will be better fed than if you offer a sophisticated super-sermon that is not your own.

When we have guests, it is always hard to serve less than an adundant feast. But the truth is, visitors would rather have home cooked food than an abundant but canned meal.

You will also find that with regular practice, the process becomes more manageable, even on a very limited time budget. Let’s go for fresh over canned, for the sake of souls: both ours and our listeners’.

Eco-Preaching: 5 Dangers of Recycling Sermons

February 2, 2012January 30, 2012 / Peter Mead / 1 Comment

Yesterday I offered five potential benefits of recycling sermons. Now let’s consider five dangers:

1. Personal stagnation. John Wesley is widely credited with saying “Once in seven years I burn all my sermons; for it is a shame if I cannot write better sermons now than I did seven years ago.” (Apparently, though, he was quoting another preacher, and disagreeing with him. We need to be careful when we recycle quotes!) But there is a validity to the sentiment expressed by whoever it was. If I always recycle the same message, I am missing out on all the growth of personal, devotional, spiritual biblical study and application, as well as the blessing of praying through new messages (since repetition of “successful” messages could lead to complacency and trust in the message rather than God).

2. Ministry burnout. Too much recycling can lead to a dangerous equation. An increase in activity (if I recycle I can preach in every possible gap in the schedule), combined with a decrease in personal feeding (since I can recycle in the wrong way without any time in God’s Word or presence), will lead toward burnout. Easy to be a firework in ministry.

3. Preaching thin. I mentioned this in passing the other day. When I prepare over several days and then preach a message, the message is much more than the outline or notes I record at the time. It is actually more than even the message I record and have on record as an audio file. There is also all the wealth of exegetical study, the supporting biblical content that didn’t make it into the message, but was fresh in my heart at the time of preaching. Returning to that message in the future means returning to a skeleton of the original. I am in danger of preaching “thin” – without the wealth of supporting materials.

4. Loss of attention. If the listeners get the sense that this is old material, rather than being a message from God for them, today, in particular, then the level of attention invariably drops. They will be subconsciously tempted to evaluate your performance, rather than listening for God’s message to their hearts. If it is recycled, it must be prayerfully re-prepared for them – don’t dump leftovers from the fridge, serve them with care! I know the various stories of “I’ll repeat the message until you act on it!” – but the truth is that it is much easier to be bold in an anecdote.

5. Loss of integrity. If the content you are recycling is not your own, then you lose integrity. More on plagiarism tomorrow!

Eco-Preaching: 5 Benefits of Recycling Sermons

February 1, 2012January 30, 2012 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

Here are five potential benefits that can come from recycling sermons. Not every one will apply to every situation, nor will every one always be a benefit. Please apply wisdom and balance this post with tomorrow’s post on the dangers of recycling sermons!

1. Time. Time is a valuable commodity. If I committed to never recycling a sermon, then I would have to take on a significantly lower amount of preaching in venues other than my local church. It can be a privilege to serve another group with a recycled sermon that doesn’t require me to sacrifice my main ministry commitments or my family.

2. Greater conviction. The first time a message is preached, it may only have a few days to saturate the heart and life of the preacher. If that message is recycled prayerfully and honestly, then the reworking of the text and the re-preaching of the message can allow the truth of it to penetrate deeper into the preacher’s life. This is not the case when a sermon becomes a mere performance through prayerless and heartless repetition. Sometimes I will listen to a message again, allowing it to minister to me, as part of my preparation to preach the same basic message.

3. Better message. If point 2 suggests that recycling can lead to a better preacher, then this point suggests the possibility of a better message. By prayerfully reviewing the first presentation, and by working further on both text and message, the recycled sermon can be a better one that its predecessor.

4. Offering our best. Let’s say a preacher is invited to preach as a guest somewhere. While it may be fair to critique itinerant preachers with their single polished gem of a sermon, there is also something to be said for a preacher offering their best. So for example, a younger preacher may have far better training and study in one particular book – why impose the requirement of preaching from a completely new section every time? I’d rather hear a preacher handling a text well than struggling through something that is new to them. If a sermon has been prepared well and it was worth saying once, why wouldn’t it be worth saying again (if refreshed, see yesterday’s post).

5. Reinforcement. I am sure we are too quick to move on in our preaching. That is, people need reinforcement. Typically this will come from thematic reinforcement from multiple messages, but perhaps there is a place for going back over familiar ground. People don’t tend to transform instantly, so why not recycle in the same venue (again, only if refreshed!)