Who Are You Preaching To?

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Preaching can be considered a relatively simple equation. You try to get the biblical message to the people sitting in the pews. Yet we so easily give all our effort to one half of that equation. We may study the passage for hours, but give little or no thought to the listeners. So next Sunday, who will you be preaching to? Lewis Smedes looked out at his church one Sunday morning and saw this:

“A man and woman, sitting board-straight, smiling on cue at every piece of funny piety, are hating each other for letting romance in their marriage collapse on a tiring treadmill of tasteless, but always tidy, tedium.

A widow, whispering her Amens to every promise of divine providence, is frightened to death because the unkillable beast of inflation is devouring her savings.

A father, the congregational model of parental firmness, is fuming in the suspicion of his own fatherly failure because he cannot stomach, much less understand, the furious antics of his slightly crazy son.

An attractive young woman in the front pew is absolutely paralyzed, sure she has breast cancer.

A middle-aged fellow who, with his new Mercedes, is an obvious Christian success story, is wondering when he will ever have the guts to tell his boss to take his lousy job and shove it.

A submissive wife of one of the elders is terrified because she is being pushed to face up to her closet alcoholism.

Ordinary people, all of them, and there are a lot more where they came from.”

Lewis Smedes, “Preaching to Ordinary People,” Leadership 4, no.4 (1983): 116.

On This You Cannot Work Too Hard

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Pastoral ministry and family life rarely yield the full quota of hours we would like to perfectly prepare each sermon.  However, there are some elements of a sermon that don’t do well with a short-cut approach.  Time spent on this aspect of the sermon is always time well spent.

Clarity.  It doesn’t come by accident.  The only thing that is clear when you don’t spend time on clarity is that you didn’t spend time on clarity.  It takes work to think yourself clear and then more work to preach in a clear manner. 

However, it is tempting to bypass this aspect of sermon preparation.  This is because everything seems so clear to you, the preacher.  You have spent hours in the text (hopefully).  You have wrestled with understanding the passage and then forming a sermon.  Yet for the clarity to come through, you have to pay close attention to matters of clarity.

I have been both a student and a teacher in preaching classes.  The students know that they need to communicate a clear big idea.  They know that the class will be asked for the big idea once their sermon is over.  Consequently the smart students “work the system” by stating and reiterating their big idea seemingly to an extreme level.  Then when the prof asks the class what the big idea was, there is usually a pause, followed by three or four different ideas.  The preacher sits there with a puzzled look.  “I thought I was being clear!”  If prepped students looking for the idea can’t spot it, what about a congregation who may not even know what a big idea is?  They’ll come up with something, but if you are not clear, then it will not be what you intended.

So before you preach your next sermon, do a review for clarity.  Is the big idea clear?  Does the sermon flow in a clear manner?  Are the transitions clear?  Are you using vocabulary people will understand?  Be clear, be clear, be clear.  If you’re not clear, then what are you achieving?

Story Basics

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Much of the Bible comes to us in story form. We should as familiar with the basic ingredients of a story as we are with riding a bicycle or driving our car. Sadly, many preachers are not. Rather than quickly dissecting a story into preachable points, take the time to review the basic ingredients. How does this story work? Consider:

1. The Setting. Where does it begin and end? What is its written context? What is the historical, geographical and cultural setting?

2. The Plot. What is the background information provided? Then what is the crisis, complication, tension point? As the tension rises, where is the resolution or climax of the tension? Then finally how does the story conclude? Is the plot simple or complex? Does it have a second complication and a second climax? Is the story left unresolved? Why?

3. The Characters. Who is major and who is minor in the story? What clues are there to help you picture the characters? Is there direct description? What do they do? What are they called? What do they say?

4. The Narrator. Every story has a story teller, but he is usually very inconspicuous. What is the perspective of the narrator? Does the narrator make any overt comments in the story? Are there brief moments of explanation or helpful asides?

Basic stuff, but we are not harmed by reviewing it again.

Hearing Is Not Like Reading

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The difference between writing for the eye and writing for the ear is often overlooked by preachers.  We tend to be book people – we may have studied formally for more years than many others, then our work requires us to keep on reading diligently.  Perhaps we even write books and articles for others to read.  All this means we too easily write for the eye by default, even when we write our sermons.  But our sermons are not for the eye.  They are designed to be heard.  People can’t go back and re-read what we just said, nor pause for thought when a particular sentence strikes a chord.  Consequently, we need to be careful to prepare sermons that work for the ear.  Various techniques will help our listeners.  Here’s an important one:

Restatement – It is not repetition (saying the same thing again, like a parrot), it is restatement (immediately saying the same thing with different words).  Repetition can sound like you think the people listening are stupid (although sometimes it is appropriate to simply repeat what you just said).  Restatement gives the listener time to take in what you are saying.  It’s useful to use with the big idea, with references to the structure of the message, with major points, etc.  When people are reading a book, they can go back and look at an important sentence to make sure they understood it.  When they are listening they can’t go back, so you need to do this for them through restatement.  Practice saying something and then saying it again in other words.  Train yourself to state your point, but then to restate it in different terms.   

How Not To Preach Every Inspired Word

/ Peter Mead / 4 Comments

As preachers of the Bible it is important that we hold a very high view of God’s Word. Verbal plenary inspiration is the doctrine that affirms the inspiration of the specific words (verbal), every last one of them (plenary). Any position that holds to less than a fully inspired and inerrant canon is a compromise wracked with inconsistency. However, as preachers who hold a high view of Scripture, there are a couple of mistakes we can easily make when preaching God’s Word:

1. Every word is inspired, but a word on its own has little value. That is to say that a word on its own carries only a selection of possible meanings. As Pasquarello puts it, words get their meaning from the company they keep. It is important to preach the words of a text in their context, rather than skimming the passage for the words that supposedly carry extra theological freight and then preaching those words as if divorced from the text. While it may have been fashionable a generation ago to preach a series of word studies, today we must be more aware of the words in their context, and preach the idea of the discourse unit.

2. Every word is inspired, but every word in a passage is not equally weighted. Since every word is inspired it is tempting to merely provide a running explanation phrase-by-phrase through the passage. While this may produce a commentary, it does not produce a good sermon. Recognize that some words function as subordinate to others in a sentence. What are the weighty words that convey the core meaning of the passage? What are the key moments in the narrative on which the whole thing turns? What words have emphasis through their unusual selection, positioning, or repetition? Preach the whole text, but don’t allow the weighty content to be hidden by giving equal time and focus to every subordinate phrase or term.

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Preachers and Their Books

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If you’re like me, you are more than happy to receive amazon.com gift vouchers for Christmas. While others may love their cars, guitars, guns or fishing rods, many preachers are in love with their libraries. If you, like me, are a closet bibliophile, this post will make you uncomfortable. Books are a real blessing and a visit to a country where pastors have access to nothing soon puts our personal libraries into perspective. Be sure to be thankful for what you have, but don’t be obsessive:

Don’t hold your books too tightly. If God has blessed you with more than a handful of books then you are very blessed. But don’t let them sit dormant on your shelves as a monument to your past spending. Let them do their work. Share books with people that are motivated to learn from them. Share your books, let them be an extension of your ministry, and if a good book is not returned or is damaged . . . just replace it. It’s not a big deal!

Become passionate about giving books away. Scan your shelves for books that you have outgrown and no longer refer to. I don’t mean trash or heresy that should be recycled like a free newspaper. But good books that are not pertinent for your study any more. Find someone who would benefit and give them the book. Take advantage of your book awareness and become a distributor of free books. You know quality books. You also have opportunities to promote and push books. Now with online sellers you can find a quantity of a good book for cheap and push them from the pulpit. Either give them away, or ask for donations to allow you to replace them with others to give away. Sometimes your free book fund will be up, sometimes down, but if books are changing lives, you are up!

Reading Matters

/ Peter Mead / 2 Comments

One further suggestion from Fred Craddock’s list of suggestions for a life of study is to set up your own library to function efficiently. I’ll take his prompting and share my thoughts on the subject of reading:

Don’t shelve books until they have been read. Either a pile on your desk or a dedicated shelf for new books is the way to go. Once a book is shelved with the others of its kind, the chances of actually reading it are reduced drastically. Engage the content of a new book enough to know if you should keep it, where it should be shelved, why you would go back to it, etc.

Read wisely, books should not be making you feel guilty. Many people feel guilty if they have started a book and not finished it. I regularly interact with people unwilling to look at a new book because they have an old one they feel obliged to finish first. Read wise. You have paid an amount of money for the book. It may be that one chapter of that book is all you need to read for your purposes. If this is the case then you paid that much money for one chapter, the rest was a bonus from Amazon! Forcing yourself to move your eyes over pages of text that are not of interest right now may appease some guilt, but you’ll learn nothing, get tired eyes and procrastinate on reading what you actually need to read. For many of us, if we could be free of guilt from unfinished books, we would be free indeed . . . well, it’s not that good, but it certainly helps!

Shelve books for access. Some books should be consulted regularly, so shelve them within easy access. I have several reference works I consult regularly, and books on interpretation and literary structure which need to be close at hand. Everything else should be shelved in an orderly manner that allows you to find what you want when you want it.

Cross-Referencing in Preaching – Part 2

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Cross-referencing may be a waste of energy.  Sunukjian rightly notes that often a move to another passage is a move in the wrong direction.  Having explained the preaching text, the preacher should then move forwards into contemporary life in order to illustrate in such a way that application is visualized by the listener.  Instead, when preachers move back to another passage, they may be wasting both opportunity and energy.  Opportunity because the text remains distant and unapplied in specific terms.  Energy because another passage will not illustrate the same idea, since it has its own distinct idea.  Furthermore, if people do not accept the teaching of one passage, they are unlikely to accept the teaching of another.  It is usually better to stay in one and teach it more fully.

Cross-referencing may be helpful if… well, there are two exceptions that I tend to take into account.  One was hinted at in part 1.  If your passage is heavily influenced by another, then the influencing passage may be a fruitful focus for a segment of the message.  The whole subject of New Testament use of Old Testament is potentially overwhelming to people (or even, in the words of John Sailhamer – Old Testament use of Old Testament such as the influence of the Torah on the Writings, etc.)  However, if the earlier text is studied in context, we’ll usually find the later text’s use of it makes sense in light of that study.  Don’t be too quick to assign hidden meanings to earlier texts and if that’s the best you’ve come up with, then don’t bother preaching that to your people. 

Cross-referencing may also be helpful if…ok, I said there are two.  The other is when a significant point in your preaching text appears to be new or unusual.  Then it is sometimes helpful for people to quickly hear a series of other texts or references that support the same point.  In this limited sense a series of quick quotes can work well.

If you do cross-reference, then…don’t make it into a sword drill.  That is to say, don’t overwhelm or distract people by expecting, or even allowing, them to hunt down every reference.  This is too much for many, and can create an inner crisis for note-takers!   This may be an occasion where I encourage the use of powerpoint.  Let people see the relevant part of each verse.  If the goal is to show that the point is not unique to this passage, then be explicit with your goal and don’t give the impression people need to remember all these references.  Sometimes just referring to the book rather than chapter and verse is sufficient.  If you do cross-reference, do it on purpose, and carefully construct that part of the sermon so people are not overwhelmed, distracted or confused.

Scripture Interprets Scripture – Cross-Referencing in Preaching

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You’ve probably heard the oft-used line that “Scripture interprets Scripture.”  This principle of hermeneutics seems to be the only principle for some people, but I would suggest it is one among many helpful principles.  It is right to say that no passage will ultimately contradict the rest of the canon, for there is a divinely inspired unity to the Bible.  However, this does not mean that we should neglect near context interpretation in favor of distant context interpretation.  What a writer means by a word or phrase should be evaluated in light of the sentence, the paragraph, the section, the book, the other books by the same writer, the other books from that time period, the other books in that “Testament” and the other books in the Bible – in that order!  Like concentric circles around the bull’s-eye, the closer the context, the more weight we should give it.  So a term used in a letter by Paul does not automatically mean the same as that term in Matthew or John or Ezekiel. 

One exception to this hierarchy of correlation would be to go to a text evidently in the thoughts of the author prior to others that may technically be “closer contexts” but were unknown to the author.  For example, when an NT writer is obviously leaning on an OT passage, that passage may be technically the most distant context, but it actually may be more helpful than another NT writer.  So I’d look more carefully at the prophet Paul is quoting than Matthew’s use of the same term.  We should correlate carefully.

Having stated that we should select cross-references in light of their actual value in interpreting our target passage, this does not mean that we need to give that information to our listeners.  We do a lot of study that does not need to be flashed from the pulpit.  Generally it is better to explain your target passage, rather than potentially confuse or overwhelm listeners with a series of different passages.  In part 2 I will give some specific guidance on cross-referencing in the pulpit.

A Life of Study – Part 2

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Three more suggestions from Fred Craddock on the life of study, with comments:

3. Develop the ability to use small units of time. When you only have a few minutes, redeem the time with brief journal articles, checking biblical references, assembling resources, sequencing material to be read, etc.

4. Regularly read novels, short stories and poetry. Craddock is right when he notes that as preachers we need the input of well-written and imaginative work. We tend to read heavy material written by experts in their field, but usually not experts in the use of language. Yet in order to communicate with compelling and gripping language, we need to be exposed to it. Avoid the cheap thrill stuff, but read well-written literature alongside everything else.

5. Resist the urge to cease studying once a sermon idea emerges. You may have an idea, but does further study strengthen it or disprove it? Allow an idea to stand the test of context and theological consistency. The goal of study is to get at the main idea, but don’t just accept the first attempt at an idea. Make sure it stands some further testing and refinement.