The Preacher’s Space

/ Peter Mead / 5 Comments

We have just returned from a two-month “home assignment/furlough” and are planning to move house in a month.  Consequently the desk is overloaded, the to-do list is growing like a newborn and things will probably only get worse.  Which leads me to today’s post . . . the preacher needs space.

Desk Space – When peripheral vision is taking in eight piles, lots of post-it notes, growing inbox notifications and unopened mail . . . it’s hard to concentrate.  At this time I suppose I can be excused for taking my Bible, a notepad and pen, and going to a Starbucks, or a park bench, or just another room in order to prepare for Sunday.  But when we move, I need to implement (for the first time, or again) a system that will keep a clear desk.

Schedule Space – When the time flies by and there is more and more to do, this is a problem for the preacher.  Even if you’re not moving or trying to find your desk after a two-month absence, the realities of ministry and family life are always there.  Which means we need to plan ahead and schedule buffer appointments – spare hours, spare afternoons, spare days, potentially even “spare” weeks.  Make appointments with family so they don’t miss out, make appointments with God so He doesn’t get squeezed, and make appointments with an old friend that you haven’t seen lately – Mr Buffer Time.

Mental Space – I don’t mean space between the ears, but space to think, to pray, to meditate.  Pressure cooker sermons can turn out.  In fact, they can be positively dynamite.  They can also be negatively dynamite.  Too many of them can undermine your spiritual integrity, overwhelm your listeners with perceived tension, and ultimately lead to low-level personal meltdowns.  If you are a weekly preacher, ask for a week off before you are desperate for it.  Be humble, admit your need of help.  As it says in Psalm 127, if we are part of what God is building, then He continues to give (and build), even while we, his beloved, sleep.

Other Space – There are other types of space we need too. Space to release tension physically through exercise, to interact socially (who wants to hear a preacher that never has time to be with people?), to enjoy time with the Lord – i.e. not a business appointment in prayer, we’re all good at those.

Suggestion – So much could be added, and please do add suggestions, both in terms of resources, books, but also ideas, etc.  Let me suggest one book.  Getting Things Done by David Allen.

How Many Sites?

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How many sites is too many sites?  Two.  On the same day.  Today the new version of cordeo.org.uk went live and I’ve been putting a few posts on there.  From next week I will be writing a post on the Cor Deo Blog every other week.  When I do, I won’t write on here, but will link to that post (since it will usually be relevant to this site anyway).

So, why not take a look at the other site, look around, comment on posts, share posts and pages on facebook or twitter, stumbleupon, digg, etc.  Test that it all works.  Then when I link to a specific post in the future, you’ll know where you’re heading with one mouse click – click here and have a look around  . . .

Thanks!

What Adjectives?

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

When you preach, what adjectives best describe your manner, tone and style?  Perhaps you tend to preach in a relaxed manner, or intense, or aggressive, or rushed, or tense, or lighthearted, or calm, or nervous.  Some adjectives are probably to be preferred over others – is there really a place for a preacher to come across as silly, or nervous, or rude, probably not.  But here are a couple of adjectival questions to ponder:

1. Would the adjective vary from sermon to sermon? People drawn to your humour, or passion, or aggression, or confidence, or hesitancy, or gentleness, or whatever, may find that same aspect of your preaching to be off-putting eventually if every sermon experience is the same.  Consider whether your preaching is overly influenced by your personal style, rather than responding to the text, the audience and the situation as it should in good communication.

2. Would a different adjective describe the same feature from another listener’s perspective? While one person may find your preaching engaging and humourous, another might offer the descriptive couplet of offensive and trivial.  Be careful not to fool yourself into thinking your style is pleasing to all, appropriate in every situation and thoroughly effective.  Gentle and calm?  Or tedious and soporific?  Passionate?  Or rude?  Orderly?  Or monotonous and predictable?  This should keep us on our toes, and on our knees, if that be possible (since prayer should saturate our delivery and reception of the message as well as the content of the message).

How would you describe your preaching?  How would your listeners?  When did you last ask one or two?  Were they free to answer honestly?

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.

Dare to Blank Sheet

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

When it comes to church change, status quo is the easiest place to be.  Whether you are thinking about the weekly schedule, or the leadership structure, or the format of services, or the approach to the pulpit ministry of the church (schedule, planning, training, preacher selection, etc.), whatever area of church life you are thinking about, status quo is the comfort zone extraordinaire.

In many cases we won’t try to think creatively until a crisis occurs. People start leaving.  The church splits.  “Terminal decline” becomes a whispered term.  Arresting the downward trend of a church is much, much harder than taking the time (and sometimes having the courage) to strategically think things through while the present doesn’t scream for it to be fixed.

So why not blank sheet sooner? As an individual, as a leadership team, and perhaps even as a church (tread very sensitively, the most immature will typically cling the tightest to certain local traditions, scream the loudest and dominate any attempted discussions if you are not very careful in how you handle this).  What is church?  What is the purpose?  Why do we meet?  What should be included?  How should it be organized?

Just because something would be better, doesn’t mean it is wise to instantly implement every possible change. Managing change is a complex process that will keep us on our knees and sometimes be heart-breakingly frustrating.  But there is value to taking a blank sheet and prayerfully dreaming about what could be and perhaps what should be.  How to get there from here is for another post, but there is value in evaluating strategically.

They Can’t Concentrate That Long!

/ Peter Mead / 3 Comments

I’d like to return to something that has been addressed on here before.  The idea that people now have a reduced attention span of fifteen to twenty minutes (insert similar number of your choice).  This is a myth.  Urban legend.  Fallacy.

People have never had a concentration span that long.  Good speakers know that people will stay with you for a few minutes.  Then if you engage them as listeners in some way, for another few minutes.  Then if you engage them again, for another few minutes.  3-5 minutes is probably the attention span of listeners today, as it was yesterday and fifty years before that.  Good speakers can hold (or regain) attention, bad speakers never could.

People can concentrate as well as ever.  I was chatting with a good friend this morning and he mentioned how young people will focus 100% for five hours without a break on a video game.  Movies are actually getting longer.  Some of the popular speakers today speak with good meaty content for 40 minutes to an hour (and the younger generation flock to hear them).  If something is worth hearing, and if the presentation is engaging, then length of presentation is not the issue many make it out to be.

So what to do about it?  In simple terms, preach well.  Better content and better delivery will have people listening better.  Gimmicks won’t.  Using visual multimedia won’t improve concentration.  Dividing a forty minute message into two twenty minute sections won’t improve concentration.  Giving people a pen and paper won’t improve concentration.  There may be a place for all of these ideas and many more, but they won’t fix the problem of inattentive listeners.  That will be fixed by better messages and better presentation.

Homiletics – Just a Practical Subject?

/ Peter Mead / 3 Comments

I recently heard a comment I’ve heard at various times and in various forms.  Essentially it was a reference to homiletics as if it were a subject of tips for public speaking, a merely practical subject that may or may not be very important in the curriculum of a training institution.  Tips for speaking, suggestions on sermon construction, it is really just a fringe subject.

While acknowledging that my perspective may be a bit biased as someone who teaches homiletics, I would beg to differ.  In my own experience of seminary training, it was in homiletics that everything converged.

Bible study methods, exegetical training and biblical theology training converged in homiletics.  Finally I discovered how the various elements of fine training coalesced into a coherent whole, with a purposeful goal.  Instead of feeling like Bible study would always be both a joyful privilege and an endless task – with the various potential avenues of study never adequately traveled – I saw the personal and corporate fruit of biblical studies as a whole.

The bar is raised on all subjects by homiletics.  We have probably all heard the old adage that to learn something well you should teach it.  It’s true, having to communicate something verbally to others does stimulate us to learn it at a higher level.  So while we may feel blessed to learn about church history and theology and so on, it is when we seek to bring these things to bear in the lives of others that we ourselves learn at a whole new level.

Spiritual formation and Christian devotion feeds into homiletics, which lies at the heart of church ministry, the focus of God’s work in the world.  The privilege of the preacher is to shepherd souls, it is soul care – both evangelistically and in edification.  This is not mere information transfer, but pastoral ministry in focused form.  There are numerous other fields of pastoral ministry, all of which matter and should be taught, but in some way or other, each feeds something into homiletics.  

In a sense all subjects converge in homiletics.  While some like to say systematic theology is the queen of the sciences, perhaps it is worth considering homiletics as the pinnacle of pastoral and theological education?

Too often homiletics is taught as a little addendum, an almost token seminar in public speaking tacked onto a robust theological education.  Let’s think again about the importance of homiletics – for the sake of the institutions, but much more importantly, for the sake of the church.

Love People To Jesus

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Lacking motivation for anything productive (post-preaching experience, anyone?), I decided to dip into Thielicke’s Encounter with Spurgeon again.  Guess how many paragraphs I had to read before being ready to offer another post (and that largely by quotation)?  One.  Check this out:

“Among the important elements in the promotion of conversion are your own tone, temper, and spirit in preaching. If you preach the truth in a dull, monotonous style, God may bless it, but in all probability he will not; at any rate the tendency of such a style is not to promote attention, but to hinder it.  It is not often that sinners are awakened by ministers who are themselves asleep.  A hard, unfeeling mode of speech is also to be avoided; want of tenderness is a sad lack, and repels rather than attracts.  The spirit of Elijah may startle, and where it is exceedingly intense it may go far to prepare for the reception of the gospel; but for actual conversion more of John is needed – love is the winning force.  We must love men to Jesus.  Great hearts are the main qualifications for great preachers, and we must cultivate our affections to that end.  At the same time our manner must not degenerate into the soft and saccharine cant which some men affect who are forever “dearing” everybody, and fawning upon people as if they hoped to soft-sawder them into godliness.  Manly persons are disgusted, and suspect hypocrisy when they hear a preacher talking molasses.  Let us be bold and outspoken, and never address our hearers as if we were asking a favor of them, or as if they would oblige the Redeemer by allowing him to save them.  We are bound to be lowly, but our office as ambassadors should prevent our servile . . .”

Back to me again.  Rather than repeating some of the gems in that paragraph, I have to ask why so many today are so quick to think only in black and white terms, to fail to differentiate within categories.  If you speak of the importance of love, then you are tarred with the same brush as the “dearing” crowd mentioned above.  If you mention the importance of tone, then you are sometimes considered a performance focused homiletician who doesn’t care about content.  Let’s be bold and outspoken, proclaiming the gospel with great hearts for God, never talking the molasses that disgusts the manly, but loving people to Jesus.

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 . . .