Stage 8 – Message Detail

Concentration Confusion

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

We are regularly told that contemporary listeners have drastically diminished concentration spans due to the changes in contemporary culture (sound bite journalism, bite-size online reading habits, commercial break saturated television, etc.)  What these “concentration span experts” fail to mention is that movies seem to be getting longer, not shorter (whatever happened to the good old 87 minute tales of the 1980’s?)  They don’t recognize that people engrossed in a good book will still read for uninterrupted hours on end.  They omit to note that a good conversation still eats up many telephone minutes.

Undoubtedly our culture has shifted on numerous levels.  Perhaps people are less willing to tolerate boredom.  But concentration spans are not the issue.  A good movie, a good book, a good conversation all hold attention as they always did.  The issue is whether or not people are interested in what is before them.  With interest people will watch a movie without flinching, focus for hours on a football game (whichever football you think I mean by that!), with interest they will surf the web losing track of time, read a book for hours on end, converse without looking at their watch.  With interest people will even listen to a sermon.

So should we indiscriminately shrink every sermon?  No.  But we should be interesting.  We should craft messages that not only pique imagination, but create a thirst for God’s Word relevantly preached.  We should endeavor to improve every aspect of delivery so that we don’t get in the way of effective communication.  The CSEs (concentration span experts) point to the listeners and claim they can’t take preaching anymore.  I point the finger at us and say let’s prove the CSEs wrong!

Preparation Place

/ Peter Mead / 7 Comments

A good sermon in the pulpit will reflect hours of work in the study.  Hours of prayerful reading, careful thinking and sometimes tearful wrestling through the process.  But no rule says preparation has to happen at the desk.  In fact, the desk can be a place of distraction!

Personally I tend to work either at home at my desk, or at a friend’s house (quieter).  However, there are times when I find I need to prepare somewhere else.  Not because I have to, but because it helps.  I sometimes think and preach through a sermon while driving (sorry for the carbon footprint!), or on a walk, or pacing around in my living room.  One time I had to answer questions from the police about what I was doing at such and such a time (“Uh, I was preaching a sermon while staring out of the window, officer!”) – I happened to fail to see anything suspicious as a crime took place down the street, but my bizarre excuse precluded further questioning!

Anyway, where do you find preparation works best for you?  Driving, walking, pacing, sitting in a Starbucks to see and sense the reality of people?  There are no rules here, but I am interested!

Don’t Blame the Wrong Thing

/ Peter Mead / 2 Comments

I regularly hear that contemporary audiences, or postmodern audiences, don’t appreciate or engage with traditional expositional approaches to preaching.  It is easy to blame the change in culture, or the shift in lifestyle, or the influence of MTV or video games.  People blame the diminishing attention spans, or the reduced openness to propositional truth, or the need for increased use of visual media.  There’s a whole lot of blaming going on.

I want to suggest a different target for our finger pointing.  Us.  People who tell me they don’t appreciate expository preaching are essentially telling me they haven’t heard any worthy of the label.  People who supposedly cannot concentrate for more than thirty seconds are somehow able to stick with good preaching for well over a snippet or micro-message.  People who are so resistant to propositional truth seem very willing to buy into presentations of truth that are carefully designed and effectively communicated.  Let’s not blame postmodernity, MTV, Nintendo Wii, or whatever.  Culture is culture and culture shifts.

We need to point the finger at ourselves.  People typically react against a caricature of expository preaching.  They react against unnecessarily dull monologues.  The solution is not to be found in gimicks, gross shrinkage of sermon length, or the random spraying of video clips.  The solution is, at least in part, better preaching.  Creative preaching.  Biblical preaching.

The finger is pointed our way.  Let’s respond well.

Big Words, Big Warnings

/ Peter Mead / 3 Comments

I recently listened to a few sessions from the last Evangelical Theological Society meetings. I’m a member and was planning to be there, but decided I’d rather teach a preaching course than attend the meetings. I have enjoyed the sessions I’ve listened to so far, but one thing stood out to me. In each of the papers that I listened to, it felt like the presenters were trying to pack the first few sentences with big words. Peer pressure, the desire to impress, the atmosphere of an intellectual atmosphere. Now as an academic I can relate to the word choices made, but as a preacher/communicator I felt very uncomfortable.

As preachers we can fall into the same trap. It is easy to choose big words when little ones would do the job. There may be the odd occasion where a big word is worth the extra effort and explanation required (such as key theological terms like justification). But often there is no real benefit to going big on the word front, and there may be real reasons not to:

Intellectual pride easily creeps in. The best sportsmen make their skill look easy, why don’t we take the same approach? Often the use of big words is partially driven by the desire to look intellectual and educated.

Communication is about communicating, not impressing. So what if people affirm the message after you’re done? So what if they take comfort from knowing that you know lots of theological stuff? The goal in preaching is not to indicate what you know, but to help them know and live out the Bible. If they don’t get the words, they won’t live the Word.

Big words can divide the church. What if some people understand the big words, while others do not? Surely a church divided along educational or class lines would undermine the very essence of the church as the New Testament presents it.

Generally speaking, when we’re tempted to use big words, let’s not.

For Improvement Just Do This

/ Peter Mead / 5 Comments

It is easy to feel pressure to preach better. We put the pressure on ourselves. Others put the pressure on us, often unwittingly. Perhaps a lack of apparent response in recent months. Perhaps comments about other preachers. Perhaps the big shots on the radio. Perhaps a renewed passion to preach well that has stirred within.

When the pressure to improve is felt, things can often seem overwhelming. After all, there are so many books, so many ideas, so many aspects of effective preaching to consider, indeed, so many preaching traditions to learn from. Maybe you skim through previous posts on this site, or other sites, or magazines, or podcasts, etc. Perhaps you let your mind go back to seminary and you recall all the instructions you received there. It can all be so overwhelming.

This may sound overly simplistic, but just do this: prayerfully endeavor to do the basics well. Try to study the passage effectively so that you are clear on the structure, the author’s main idea and purpose in writing. Try to think through your sermon purpose in light of both the passage and the congregation. Try to determine a clear main idea (doesn’t have to be an all-time great one), a clear and simple structure, a way to start that will make listeners want to hear the rest of the sermon and a way to finish so that the impact of the text will be felt in a specific area of their life. Do the basics well. You’ll probably find the pressure lifts because your preaching is much closer to what you want it to be!

Think Through The Reading

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It is easy to take the reading of the Bible for granted.  It is easy to make a mess of it too!  For example, consider Joshua 6:16-19.  The narrative has built to a climax.  The Israelites are about to complete their silent march attack strategy with the great shout.  As you are reading through this section, if you have engaged your own passion and imagination, then you will be excited to read Joshua’s command.

“SHOUT! FOR THE LORD HAS GIVEN YOU THE CITY!”  Naturally at this point you will find your voice raised and your lungs tight.  The problem is that his shout command turns out to be a somewhat detailed instruction.  What appears at first to be a 9-word exclamation turns into a 104-word detailed instruction on what to destroy, who to save, where to put the treasures, etc.

If you were to read this passage without thinking through the reading ahead of time, you might need a paramedic!  104 words at the intensity of the initial 9 words and you’ll have tight lungs, a raspy voice, a new color of face and about three minutes of recovery time before you can preach on!

It’s a small thing, but length and intensity of speech, along with difficult pronunciations or potential Freudian slips can really derail the message!  Think through any text reading ahead of time.

Texts Only Bend So Far

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

Be honest, sometimes you find yourself trying to make a text do something it doesn’t do.  Perhaps you have an illustration you want to use, or a visual aid that would be powerful, or some other motivation.  But when it comes to the text, it doesn’t quite work.  You know the order is backwards, you know you don’t want to admit it, but we’re being honest here.

This happened to me last week.  I’m not one for creative visual aids, but one came to mind.  One that would be perfect and impressive and effective and so on.  But then I went back to the only real text that would work with that visual aid.  It didn’t work.  I was trying to conform the text to the sermon, rather than derive the sermon from the text.  The text wasn’t boss, and I wasn’t happy.

But I felt that the integrity move at that point was to drop the illustration and switch texts.  Let’s be preachers of integrity, people who represent the text well and don’t injure the text trying to fit it into our sermon box.

Preaching Tired – Part 2

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

Sometimes we have to preach tired.  Life seems to work that way.  We try to avoid it, but life happens.  So when Sunday morning comes and you’re feeling wiped out, what should you do?  Well, it seems to me that we need to be aware:

Be aware of your attitude – When feeling tired and a little cranky, it is easier to preach with the voice “frowning” than “smiling.”  A gentle nudge of an application can slip into an insensitive poke from the pulpit.  Encouragement can come across as criticism.  Humor in illustrations can take on an unhealthy edge.

Be aware of your body language – The words of the preacher are supremely important, but they can be undermined not only by tone of voice, but also by body language.  If you look tired or disinterested, then your important words are undermined.  I’m not suggesting you fake your energy, but simply give it slightly more attention than normal.

Be aware of apologies – It is always tempting to begin with some apology about your lack of energy or preparation.  After all, people will understand why my message is not up to par this time, right?  Well, it will probably undermine your message and distract your listeners.  Nine times out of ten they won’t know you were tired or distracted.  But once you apologize they are focused on you rather than your message to them.  Often the temptation to apologize is driven by pride since we want people to think highly of our “performance.”  (Also it may cause low-level resentment if their week has been tougher than yours, but you get the sympathy!)

Preaching in Saul’s Armor?

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

Brian McLaren finishes his chapter on leadership in Adventures in Missing the Point with an analogy from David and Goliath.  He feels that too many ministers are trying to do ministry dressed up in Saul’s XXL armor, when in fact they are size M or even size S people.  We need to do our ministry, we need to preach our sermons, as ourselves, not as some supposed spiritual superhero.

I recently wrote about preaching to ordinary people.  It should go without saying that we preach as ordinary people.  But perhaps the legacy of pulpit personas and Sunday morning image presentation makes it necessary to make the point.  We preach as ordinary people.  Perhaps size M, perhaps size S, probably not an XXL.  Strangely enough, we know how the story ended with non-XXL David being himself in the task ahead of him, knowing that God was Himself in that same task.

(Incidentally, McLaren and Campolo either write the chapter or respond to the other’s writing.  While not agreeing with either on every detail, I can’t help but mention how much I have resonated with Campolo’s careful critiques of McLaren’s sometimes cavalier criticisms.)

Shifting From We to You

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

Robinson suggests that there comes a point in a sermon, at least in a good sermon, when the listener loses track of all the people around them. Before, the preacher was one of us, representing us before God, but now there is a shift so that the preacher is representing God to me individually. There is a point at which “we” language can effectively give way to “you” language. There is that need for each individual to make personal application of the sermon.

If we shift too early, we run the risk of coming across as full of ourselves. We can offend people by our personal presence in the presentation.

If we shift too late or not at all, we run the risk of falling short of making the call of Scripture on the lives of God’s people.

There is no set point. It depends on the sermon, on the speaker, on the listeners, on the setting. But we undermine our ministry by neglecting either “we” or “you” language, or by failing to evaluate when the shift can and should occur.