Give Me A Break!

/ Peter Mead / 2 Comments

Listeners can concentrate when we motivate them to do so. But it is important to remember that it is mentally tiring to maintain intense concentration.

In a conversation we find ourselves checking out now and then, or cracking a joke periodically to bring relief from the intensity. In preaching we need to be considerate of the mental energy of our listeners.

When I was growing up and preaching some early sermons (or versions thereof!), my church decided to believe the hype about concentration spans (i.e. it is impossible for contemporary listeners to concentrate beyond 15 minutes). They were conservative enough to want to keep their 30+ minute sermons, so they decided to break up the sermons with a hymn or chorus at the half-way stage. The logic seems clear enough. The idea was flawed. As a listener I could tell it didn’t work. When I preached I could feel the problem! After singing and switching off for several minutes, the preacher had to re-introduce the sermon in order to get listeners onboard again. Don’t try this at home.

However, listeners do need breaks in the intensity now and then. A good illustration can really help (as long as it is somehow moving the message forward rather than merely pressing pause). Humor carefully used can break tension, release some steam as people take the chance to laugh, then re-engage more willingly. Varying pace, pitch and power of the voice are critical, not to mention the strategic use of pause. In reality people can’t concentrate for even 15 minutes at once, it is more like 3-5 minutes – so carefully shape the sermon in appropriate length movements with very deliberate and careful transitions!

Concentration uses energy, even when people are motivated. So as a preacher don’t simply shrink every sermon or chop it up to allow for commercial breaks. Instead strive to stir motivation (interest, need, thirst), design sermons in suitable movements with careful transitions, and present with an engaging enthusiasm that provides appropriate breaks to keep people with you.

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!

Preachers Employed Elsewhere

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

Recently Mike quoted Haddon Robinson concerning preaching being your center:

“If preaching is not your center, then you will not preach. You will give all of your time, all of your energy, and all of your heart to other areas of ministry. However, if you are called by God to preach, if you burn to preach, if preaching is your center, then you will do whatever is necessary to make preaching central to your week of ministry.”

The target for this statement is evidently the full-time minister.  But what about the thousands of preachers who earn their living in “secular” employment?  Andrea in Italy wrote and asked, “How can preaching be my center, when I have a secular job?  Is there anyone in a situation like mine?”

Globally there are many more preachers earning their living from other employment than there are those privileged with a paycheck for preaching.  Of these preachers who earn their living outside of preaching, there are two categories.  First, there are those, like Andrea, with a passion and burden to preach.  Second, there are those who preach occasionally, but preaching is not primarily “their thing.”

So if you have a passion and burden to preach the Word, but by choice or circumstance are paid for other work, can preaching still be your center?  I believe it can.  First, God knows your situation and the time you are able to sacrificially devote to preaching (reading, studying, preparing, etc.)  Second, the fire can still burn in your heart as you work (analyzing culture, learning about people, experiencing life in all its complexity, practicing the presence of God through conversational prayer, reading a preaching book during lunch, etc.)  Third, whether it is our job or not, we all have to continually choose whether preaching is really central to our reason for existence!

The Bible does affirm the reimbursement of some who are devoted to preaching and teaching.  But the Bible does not require a preacher to be “full-time” in order to serve God in such a ministry.  A preacher with other paid employment may have some disadvantages (less time to study the text and prepare), but also has some definite advantages (more opportunity to study the listeners, potentially greater credibility, and typically higher income !)

If a preacher has other employment and still tries to preach three-plus times each week, then I feel for their predicament.  But if they preach slightly less frequently than paid preachers, perhaps there is little difference overall!

I remember a conversation with a missionary in Africa who felt discouraged because he often had to work 18 hours per day on the land in order to sustain his family.  He felt like he should quit the ministry since he didn’t have more time, or “full-time” to give.  I asked if he’d seen any fruit in his ministry.  He had.  Through this brother God had planted six churches among an unreached nomadic tribe.  He knew of no other evangelical missionary working among this people group.  So, my profound advice to him?  Don’t quit.

Pay is a privilege for some of us.  Ministry is a privilege for all of us.  If preaching is the central passion of your ministry, then whatever your life circumstances, it will show!

Love it, Hate it

/ Peter Mead / 2 Comments

I just spent some time together with Mike Roth.  We were discussing a couple of passages and some teaching preaching related issues.  Interesting comment that lingered in my mind and heart.  We both said essentially the same thing, “I love it when I don’t preach on a weekend . . . and I hate it when I don’t preach on a weekend.”

Preaching stirs something very deep.  It stirs up all sorts of emotion and tension.  It stirs up all sorts of passion.  If you are a regular preacher, enjoy the next break you get.  Be thankful for the rest.  But be thankful for the privilege of getting back to it too.

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!

Let Agony Reassure You

/ Peter Mead / 2 Comments

Preaching is agonizing.  Giving birth to a sermon is a regular pain.  The effect is felt in our emotional, spiritual, mental and physical selves.  Rarely does a sermon fall together with ease, get delivered with nothing but joy and result in tangible spiritual fruit for all.  Typically the preaching experience is unlike any other.  It hurts.  It raises huge question marks on a regular rhythm.  It takes something out of you that leaves you vulnerable and broken.  You can shrug off a bad round of golf, or a poor session at the gym before your peers, or even am uncomfortable evening of hospitality that didn’t quite go to plan.  But a sermon is different.  You don’t shrug it off.  Even a good one leaves lingering doubts, feelings of failure and the gentle scars of sermonic ministry.

These things can be discouraging.  The interrupted preparation.  The blind side critique.  The barbed feedback.  The polite feedback.  The excessive hand-shaking response coupled with the pathetic life response.  It can all be discouraging, but let it encourage you today.  If it was easy, if there were no struggles, no emotions, no sense of inner turmoil and personal agony, then perhaps it would be nothing more than a hobby, a personal venture.  Preaching the Word of God is a spiritual battle of the first order.  Just like evangelism.  Just like missions.  It’s not meant to be easy.  It’s meant to be real.  Let the agony reassure you.  It’s real.  God is real.  So is the enemy.  So is the battle.  So will be the lasting fruit wrought through it all.

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.

Why Was the Text Written?

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

In a general sense everything written in the Bible was written for our instruction (Rom.15:4).  Yet as preachers we can fall into the trap of looking for a sermon in a text, rather than fully pursuing the process of allowing the text to be boss of the sermon.

Yesterday I was discussing Genesis 3 with a friend.  I’ve heard sermons that essentially ignore everything after verse 7 in order to give a how-to guide to resisting temptation.  Was that why the chapter was written?  This was not merely an example of temptation, it was the Fall.  While there may be a place for noting the steps Eve took that led to disaster, surely this cannot dominate the message to the extent that the passage becomes a mere instructional piece.

Why was it written?  There is instruction about a one-off event with lasting implications that face us all everyday.  There may be passing lessons to learn about the way the enemy works in our response to God’s instruction.  There also is significant space given to explanation of the consequences of the Fall.  There is also hope interwoven with judgment in the seed of the woman to come.

When we pause and ponder enough to recognize that the passage is not an instructional anecdote, but one of the most significant events of history, and that the reverberations of that event are wobbling our world moment by moment right until this moment, and that the solution is not in our ability to implement lessons from Eve’s conversation, but in the hope of the seed of the woman who would come and crush the serpent’s head.  When we spend enough time in the text and see why it was written, then we are in a better place to preach the Word.  After all, it was written for our instruction, so that through the encouragement of Scriptures we might have hope!  (Rom.15:4)

Preaching To Few

/ Peter Mead / 7 Comments

I’m just finishing RT Kendall’s book on his 25 years at Westminster Chapel.  He reflects several times on the low numbers he had at the chapel.  It seems that in a church that would hold 2000, his congregation was typically 150-300.  The only time the place was full was for his farewell.  He wrote candidly of his discouragement due to low numbers.

I preach in a variety of settings to crowds of all different sizes.  Since people are not attending due to my presence, it tends not to bother me at all.  However, to be pastor of a famous church, in a large building, but never to see numbers increase as you would desire, that has to be disheartening.

I remember reading of one man who preached with his eyes shut so that he would not be discouraged.  I wouldn’t encourage that for several reasons relating to the nature of expository preaching and also pulpit safety.  But what should you do?  If the circumstances conspire to make numbers an issue, then how should one respond?

I would be interested in any experiences of discouragement by numbers, or anecdotes from other preachers.

The Pressure of Infinite Resources

/ Peter Mead / Leave a comment

We live in a time when we have potential access to more study resources than ever before.  There are countless commentaries on every book of the Bible, including exegetical, technical, semi-technical, expositional, applicational, background, socio-cultural, devotional.  Then there are the Bible dictionaries, encyclopedias, literary guides, and so on.  And I shouldn’t forget the preaching helps – outlines, illustrations, series ideas, and so on.  All of this is in print, most of it is available as software, and then there is the bottomless pit of online material, ranging from helpful to truly pathetic.

What an incredible time to live in, but what a pressure it puts on us as preachers!  What if there is a resource that will unlock this passage for me and I haven’t got it or read it yet?  What if I am failing to preach as I should because I have failed to access the right preparation resource?

Learn to Discern. Discern which resources are worth owning on whatever budget you have.  Discern which ones duplicate other or earlier works.  Discern which are helpful for preaching and which are actually quagmires.  Discern how to use the web with skill rather than endless bunny trailing through cyber-space.

Remember this is God’s work and He knows. He knows what resources you actually have access to and time for.  He knows what level of training you’ve had.  He knows how pressured your preparation has been.  He knows.

In my case, I typically consult between four and ten (well-chosen and well-trusted) resources on a typical sermon.  We are blessed with more available, in more formats, than ever before.  But remember that our task is not to endlessly trawl through it all. Our task is to study God’s Word with His help, using only a small percentage of the available resources, according to our means and training, in order to preach the Word accurately and effectively to our listeners.