Manipulative Preaching

I enjoyed a conversation with a church planter recently. He made a comment that I’m hearing more and more. There is a trend, not new, but seemingly on an upswing, toward distant preaching. That is, preaching that is safely removed from any hint of emotional appeal or accusations of manipulation. It is a manner that reveres the intellectual, but makes little or no attempt to touch the heart. It is cold, distant, removed, disaffected.

Somehow proponents seem to think that this kind of preaching leaves room for the Holy Spirit to work out the impact in listeners’ lives. It protects the speaker from accusation of manipulation. It keeps the main thing the main thing and allows the truth to stand unsullied by any emotional appeal.

On the other hand, perhaps it abdicates the preacher’s responsibility to fully engage either the text or the listener. Perhaps it provides for a prideful presentation of knowledge. Perhaps it protects the preacher from any responsibility when listeners do not respond, since that, of course, is the Spirit’s concern, not theirs.

I find it concerning that this kind of preaching is coming up more and more in conversation. It is a sort of expository preaching corrupted. Expository preaching is not simply about presenting the truth. It is about presenting the truth of the Scripture in an effective communication manner that emphasizes the relevance to the contemporary situation of listener and seeks response. Every element of the preaching preparation and presentation should lean fully into God’s work by His Spirit, but that offers no excuse for abdication on the part of the preacher.

Am I faithfully representing the text when I neuter it and remove all affective appeal? Am I really showing pastoral care for the flock when I turn the multi-dimensional appeal of Scripture into an intellectual exercise? Am I really honouring God when I act as if I, as His representative, am doing my job by simply informing? Am I really avoiding manipulation when I give the impression that Christianity is primarily about the commodity of knowledge and I am the dispenser of it?

There’s more to say, but I don’t want to lose the focus on that last sentence . . .

Thought I’d follow up on Saturday’s post by sharing a quote I appreciated in the book I will name this week:

You must not fear to have affective goals for the sermon as well as cognitive goals. There is nothing wrong with trying to move the listener. It is not manipulative to seek to engage their entire being with the truth. Manipulation is when the preacher overwhelms the emotions (or the mind for that matter), and creates a disorientation that actually takes the power of will away from the listener. (p.106)

I like that definition in some ways. I like the recognition that manipulation occurs when disorientation is prompted by overwhelming. I like the recognition that such overwhelming can be of the emotions and also of the mind. When this occurs, something is taken away from the listener – somehow their decision making is controlled by an outside force, rather than by the appropriately shaped motives of their own heart.

Is the will ever truly free? Perhaps not, but the heart must be free to supply the values that the mind and will rely on to make decisions. Supplanting the heart with emotional hype, or with overwhelming intellectual astonishment, or even excessive pressure on the will itself (guilt-trip preaching) . . . are all a problem, all can be manipulation.

As a preacher convinced that my role is to speak to the heart, and not just the head, I must regularly wrestle with the issue of manipulation. I must ponder the interaction of the soul’s faculties. I must spurn any rhetorical technique designed to manipulate the listener. I must consider what is biblically, ethically, theologically appropriate as one who has the privilege of speaking the Word of God into the lives of others.