Stage 8 – Message Detail

Are You Sure You Want To Do That?

/ Peter Mead / 2 Comments

It is so tempting, but are you sure you want to do that?  Perhaps a commentary suggests another way to translate the text.  Or perhaps you have studied a little Greek and think that they have made a mistake in their handing of a tense or whatever.  So you’re tempted to criticise the translation the people are reading as you preach.

Now there are advantages to criticising it.  For one, it makes you look like you know what you are talking about when it comes to original languages – which may or may not be the case.  Another advantage is that it shows you have been studying hard in preparation.  Then, of course, presuming you do know what you are talking about, there is the advantage of greater understanding of the text for all who are present.

But there are some very real disadvantages too.  First, and most important of all in my estimation, you are planting seeds of doubt as to the trustworthiness of the rest of the translation.  They may see this particular verse more clearly (may is the important word here), but now they don’t know if they can trust the other 1188 chapters full of verses.  Also, they are now probably celebrating your knowledge (whether you have it or not).  This should make you a bit twitchy, unless your goal is the praise of men, of course.

Why am I making this point, does it happen?  Oh yes.  I heard a fine Hebrew scholar completely undermine the translations in a sermon almost ten years ago . . . and I still have that lingering sensation of not being able to trust the translations as I think of that message (sermons can prove to be very memorable).  A while ago I heard a well-read, but poorly or incompletely trained Greek reader inadvertently critique the translations.  Now this gentleman would presume he knows enough about Greek to say what he said, people always do.  But his errors were those of a relative novice.  If you haven’t studied Greek seriously beyond about the second year of seminary, presume you don’t know enough to comment too firmly in public.  And as the first example shows, even if you do know enough, are you sure you want to do that?

What to do?  Often it is possible to “correct” a translation subtly in the explanation of the text, or even in the reading, without drawing attention to it.  Often it is enough to say something like, “this could also be put this way . . .” without saying such things as “the translators got it wrong here,” or, and I can’t believe I heard this one, “the translators played a trick on us here…”

Are you sure you want to do that?

What Makes For Thin-Blooded Preaching?

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

After a whole series of careful caveats, Michael Quicke defines what he means by thin-blooded preaching in 360-Degree Leadership.  I’ll share brief introductions to each thought, but really recommend buying the book and thinking through his argument first-hand.

1. Individualistic – It is easier to preach to individuals, than to address the complexities of corporate church life, and the calling of the Body of Christ in the world.

2. Aimed at head or heart but rarely both together – On the one hand there is preaching that lodges great slabs of words into heads to occupy listeners with note taking – “Cerebral preachers love to use ‘The Blessed Treasury of Wonderful Bible Verses that will accompany your sermon text and fill up the space to stop you pursuing its specific consequences.'”  Equally he critiques the feel-good preaching that by-passes Scripture in order to only touch the emotions.

3. Spineless Theology – Not theology in general, but the theology of preaching that is essentially unitarian and essentially denies the existence of an actively involved Christ or Holy Spirit, making sermon preparation and delivery an almost entirely human endeavour.

4. Generic Applications – That is, the lightweight fare of homely examples and cheerful little stories that is nonspecific and nonconfrontational.  Pithy anecdotal material that could have been preached unchanged half a century ago, therefore indicating that it isn’t really about gospel transformation of community today.

5. Avoids Conflict – only nurturing and shepherding without exhorting.  This kind of preaching may boldly denounce generic sins, but timidly avoid at all costs the simmering tensions in the church such as crippling tension over worship, or disputes between families.

That is quite enough for one post.  Like me you probably “amen-ed” at least a few of those, but they are all worth pondering as you prayerfully considering your preaching and the preaching-leadership of your church.  I’ll share the other five tomorrow.

Ingredients for Creativity

/ Peter Mead / 2 Comments

If you want to increase creativity in your preaching, what is needed?

1. Time. If you are squeezed for time then it will not be possible to add the extra work needed (and the thinking capacity needed) for adding creativity to your preaching.

2. Freedom and trust. It is important to know the congregation to whom you preach.  Many will not easily accept more creative approaches to preaching unless there is first a building up of trust and a shared commitment to the core elements of true preaching (i.e. that a particular form is not the definition of faithfulness to the ministry!)

3. Better reading of the text. We need to grow in our ability to thoroughly engage with texts and recognize their genre, their features, their mood, their narrative context, etc.  Better Bible study can help develop more creative preaching.

4. Awareness of yourself as a preacher. We all need to know our own strengths and weaknesses in preaching.  Are you effective in description, in storytelling, in timing of key phrases, in disarming listeners, in role-playing, etc.?  Don’t get too creative in areas of weakness, but built on the strengths first.

5. Exposure to creative and different preachers. Don’t just copy what someone else has done, but if you are never exposed to other preachers, you will struggle to break out of the confines of your own style and tradition.

What would you add to this list?

You Can’t Cover Everything

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

People appreciate expository preaching if it is done well.  People tend not to prefer the taste of exhaustive preaching.  The preacher is always tempted to try to cover every angle on every detail in the text.  After all, you’ve probably put hours of work into prayerful study and research, much of which has proved to be interesting and helpful to you.  But when it comes time to preach, selectivity is required.

Here is where the Big Idea becomes such a big deal.  Having the sharp focus of a main idea that reflects accurately and relevantly the main idea of the passage allows you to determine how to be selective.  An avenue of detail, or an anecdote of background information, or a cross-reference, or an illustration, or a side-point, or a personal soapbox, or whatever . . . if it doesn’t fully support that main idea, then it is immediately under scrutiny and should probably be chopped.

Selectivity has to take place before preaching.  Preparing to preach is not just about studying the passage.  Effort is required in preparing the message too.  Going into the preaching event stuffed full of information and selecting as you deliver tends to be as effective as planning your conclusion when you arrive at the end of your preaching time.

As Haddon Robinson has put it, “preaching can be like delivering a baby, or like delivering a missile.  In one your goal is to hit the target, in the other, your goal is to just get it out.”  It is in the “baby delivering” sermons that listeners tend to confuse expository preaching with exhaustive, exhausting, rapid-fire or overwhelming preaching.

Selectivity is probably one of the hardest skills and disciplines in preaching to master, but one of the most important.

Here’s a post from the early days . . . just for old time’s sake!

Points in a Narrative Text Sermon

/ Peter Mead / 14 Comments

There is a field of homiletics referred to as narrative preaching, but this post is concerned with the preaching of a narrative passage – eg. David and Goliath, Joseph in Potiphar’s House, Hannah & Samuel, etc.

In other posts I have encouraged the use of full sentence points, rather than descriptive titles that make the message outline look like a commentary synopsis.  The full thoughts help you communicate effectively, generally avoiding historical past tense sentences helps you not sound like a commentary recycler.  But it is worth clarifying a couple of points on points:

1. If the message structure reflects the story structure, then some points may be better stated in historical terms. What I mean is that in an attempt to be contemporary, we can end up making three or four life principles out of the developing elements of the story, rather than allowing the story to be told properly.  The problem then becomes a moralizing approach to the details of a story, rather than allowing the force of the story to stand behind the main point, which itself might best be the only focus of application.  Stories that are told effectively will hold attention, so it is not necessary to generate points of relevance or application throughout the detail of the story.  Pay careful attention to the introduction, generating a definite sense of sermon relevance there, then feel free to be in the world of the narrative for a large part of the message, continually building to the relevance that may only become overt in point 3 or 4 (i.e. whenever the main idea is revealed with its abiding theological thrust).

2. Shorter biblical stories may work best with a default sermon outline. Namely, point 1 is to tell the story.  Point 2 is to state and clarify the main idea of that story.  Point 3 is to reinforce and drive home the application of that main idea.  In this case point 1 is automatically historical.  Point 2 should be written in contemporary terms.  Point 3 has to be contemporary, including all sub-points.  Again the introduction is important, but I suspect that will be the case in almost every sermon that we preach (whether we give it the necessary attention or not).  This approach underlines the fact that the outline of a sermon is for your eyes only.  Once we realize our goal is not to transfer an outline, but to give the text in such a way as to clarify the main point and apply it, then we are freed from the burden of turning every narrative into a parallel rhyming assonated demonstration of guilded wordsmithery.

Managing Message Momentum

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

Even the best message preparation often overlooks the critical issue of momentum.  So messages will often follow one of these patterns:

1. “U” … Start with a bang – drag on through the bulk – pick up for a strong finish.

2. “/” … Start slow – gradually increase in energy and get going.

3. “\” … Start strong – lose dynamic after the introduction, or first point, and drag to the end.

Each of these patterns will undermine the effectiveness of the preaching event.  Equally, while some preachers seem content to flatline “_” (i.e. never generate energy or momentum), it is not usually possible for listeners to cope with the opposite (i.e. constant high energy and fast pace).

If you have felt like your preaching tends toward one of these patterns, or if others have hinted at it.  What can you do?

1. Try to work out where the momentum was missing. Was it an unclear transition?  Was it a sequence of explanatory points?  Was it at the point you lost confidence in your content?  Was it just through a lethargic unplanned introduction?  Was it at a difficult juncture in the text?  If you can figure out where momentum was missing in previous messages, this will help you identify where the same could happen in future messages.

2. Listen to yourself practice. Sometimes you can get the sense of momentum struggles in a run through of the message, but not always.  It may be worth recording a run through and listening to it . . . but obviously that requires you to be on top of your preparation.

3. Evaluate the sermon map. Most of us tend to use an outline rather than an actual sermon map, but we can still evaluate it as a map.  As well as evaluating it for location of illustrations (the normal approach, which actually can generate predictability as people see every illustration coming), also look for points of relevance, and consider the terrain . . . will this bit be hard to traverse for the listener?  Marking your outline may allow you to energise a potentially monotonous section with illustration, review & preview, interlude, or even by overviewing rather than detailing a segment.

4. Weigh the sermon on the scales. Many of us tend toward simply making too many points, giving too much explanation, trying to give too much and the sermon is simply too heavy.  What would be lost if you chose to lighten the content slightly and create some breathing space?  If the main point of the text is not lost, then are we choosing to keep content because we want to demonstrate our insight, our study, our knowledge?

Energy, pace, vocal variation, movement, progress, laughter, relevance . . . the complex factors of message momentum.

Do We Need To Challenge Our Implied Assumptions?

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

I just read an interesting article entitled Is Leadership a Healthy Christian Aim? It gets into the issue of what we connote by the terms we use.  In this particular case, the fact that adding “servant” to “leadership” doesn’t undo the connotations implicit in leadership language so revered in Christian circles.  I suppose I could argue with the article in places, and perhaps suggest that our goal should be to produce influencers, and influencers, by some definitions, are leaders – whether or not they are recognized officially.  But perhaps I would be falling into the same problem the article is addressing.

So as preachers, do we reinforce, or play along with, common Christian conceptions that actually need overt challenging?  How about the notion that single is second class?  How about the numerous class distinctions still dividing society (especially, perhaps, in the British context)?  How about the idea that only a very few are called to serve in missions?  Or equally, that all are missionaries just by virtue of their existence, wherever they are, irrespective of their attitude to life and ministry? How about the myth of contemporary financial security and its value (irrespective of amount of consumer credit needed)?  How about the notion that life consists in everything to do with this life only?  (How many practical applicational sermons function as if eternity is irrelevant to everyday life?)

I could go on with random statements, but the point is important.  It is easy to fall into the trap of preaching in such a way that we actually reinforce wrong thinking.  We can do that by the words we use, the illustrations we choose, by what is said and by what is not said.  Enough said.

Helping People Trust Their Bibles – Part 2

/ Peter Mead / 4 Comments

I recently wrote a post relating to textual criticism – please click here to see it. Shrode commented and asked for an example of how I might address the issue of a missing verse while preaching on the passage. Relatively simple, gracious and trust-building was the request. Here’s my attempt (okay, so length may be slightly longer than I’d prefer for a post, but there is content that may not be necessary in the last two paragraphs – and it takes 2.5 minutes more or less):

If you look carefully you’ll notice that verse 4 is missing in this chapter.  Uh oh!  Looks like our Bibles have a problem!?  Actually, no, I would suggest this is a good thing.  We don’t tend to think about them, but there are a whole lot of archeologists and scholars who are constantly at work trying to make sure we have the most accurate and trustworthy Bibles possible.  Let me put it to you this way – we don’t have the original letters that Paul wrote, or the original gospels, or the original books of Moses, etc.

That sounds like a problem, but actually, they were probably destroyed precisely to avoid a problem.  You see, over time, manuscripts would fade and curl at the edges and get worn out.  But if perfect copies were made, why keep a fading original?  Well, over time imperfections crept into the copies of copies of copies.  Over the past centuries archeologists have continued to find more and more manuscripts and biblical quotes in manuscripts.  Gradually they are finding more and more of those copies of copies.  This means that experts can then weigh the evidence to work out what the original actually said.  So when you see a verse number (here verse 4), but no text, this means that evidence has proved that the text in older translations was very likely added later on, rather than being original.

Just in case you are thinking that this really undermines our Bibles, after all, can we trust these people . . . what if they have an agenda?  Actually, I’d point out that as well as some who are very evangelical and conservative Bible believing Christians, there are also many who have no specific belief in the God of the Bible, and some who perhaps are anti the God of the Bible.  Yet despite these differences there is a good concensus that the original text our modern translations are translated from is actually very, very, accurate.  Any discrepancies in the manuscript evidence now only add up to less then 2% of the text, and none of those texts change any of the main teachings of the Bible.  Should it be “Jesus Christ” or “Lord Jesus Christ” . . . that probably doesn’t change much in the book of Acts, for example.

Oh, and one last thing, some people will try to tell you that the Bible has been translated hundreds, or thousands of times . . . like a giant historical chain of chinese whispers [only refer to this if people use that label for the game].  The truth is that actually your modern English Bible has been translated only once, direct from the best original text ever available in the history of Bible translation.  Verse 4 is missing, and rightly so, it shouldn’t have been added in the first place.  We can really and truly trust our English Bibles.  I’d be happy to chat more about this issue if you are concerned.

Now, back to the passage…

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.