Some Random Thoughts on Preaching (2)

I wrote some initial random thoughts here. Again, let me say,  these are just some perspectives on where we’re at. I don’t want to be an armchair critic and I love the men I get to hear preaching in my own congregation and am grateful for other preachers that I hear. Please don’t think I’m holding myself up as some kind of model; I’m not a preaching connoisseur……….

People are more ready to listen than we are to speak – I want to argue we need more preaching, more opportunities to hear the Word. Partly it was reading Calvin’s Company of Pastors by Manesch that convinced me we need to saturate people with Word ministry but also my experience with lunchtime services. There are hungry Christians out there who want more of God’s Word. We are all slightly terrified of running something that only has small numbers; we need to get over ourselves on this. I think it might be worth an early evening preaching service one night of the week partly for those who work shifts or the like. The idea that we can survive on one sermon per week is a modern phenomenon that frankly isn’t true. Multiple opportunities for Word ministry provide greater opportunities for training, encourage believers and give opportunities for outsiders to hear the gospel. The other ridiculous argument is that people are so busy in church they have no time for outsiders. This doesn’t make sense when the service is only 30 minutes.

Sermon Outlines occasionally help but often hinder – To state the obvious, preaching is oral communication. It is different from writing a chapter in a book or an essay; it is not the same thing as giving a lecture. At it’s simplest there is a verbal spoken word by a man who is listened to and understood by the congregation which should take place in preaching. I’m not wholly against printing an outline of your sermon; they can be helpful, particularly when the structure of the passage is important (when people try to explain chiasms verbally it’s normally very painful).  So what I am trying to say is people should be able to remember the points we have made without an outline. Sometimes I fear that outlines betray a view of preaching that is more a transfer of information than an encounter with Christ through his Word. Don’t misunderstand me, I don’t think there have to be points, I need them because I’m not good enough as a communicator to do without them but, if we have them, work hard at them, make them memorable. To have outlines with long sentences of teaching points reveals that we’ve not put the thought in to make the sermon stick in peoples minds. I also wonder whether congregations seeing the outline in front of them, think, ‘I know where he’s going’ and subconsciously switch off. Perhaps giving an outline at the end of church might be a good prompt for devotions during the week.

Over Preparation and Under Preparation – Sometimes our preachers have done masses of work on the text, seen the biblical theology connections, given us insights from the original languages, clearly shown us the melodic line of the book, carefully crafted illustrations, introduction and conclusion and yet the sermon lacks an earthy connectedness. It’s correct but lacks life. The sermon just feels like an exercise of the mind. You can tell when this has happened as the heads of people listening drop or eyes glaze over as they stare blankly into space.

It’s hard to work out why this is the case sometimes, and there may be a variety of reasons, but I wonder if it’s because there is possibly too much time in the study and not enough time with people. I don’t just mean one to one Bible studies but sitting with older folk, hospital visiting, normal human interaction etc, working out what difference the sermon should make to different peoples lives. The big thing that I find I need in preparation is time; time to marinate and meditate on the text and how to shape the message that is right for the congregation. It means finishing our book work earlier in the week so the message becomes embedded in us.

Q&A – It’s the trendy thing at the moment to have Question and Answer after a sermon and I can see the merit in it, we’re told the model being Acts 17 where there is obvious dialogue, although preaching is always dialogical by its very nature. However, I think the q&a straight after preaching is pretty foreign to what we see mainly in Acts and the best models of preaching in Church History. If preaching is a confrontation with God through the Word of God by the man of God it would seem to me that the correct response to that is not Q&A but repentance. The authentic response in Acts is being cut to the heart. I fear the edge is taken off sermons often by Q&A. True preaching is adversarial – there is a collision between God and man every time someone preaches. We know this don’t we? Those times when God has spoken clearly to us through the preaching of his Word we’ve not wanted a Q&A, we’ve just known that we’ve done business with God. There  has to be a place in congregations for discussion and Q&A but I’m not convinced straight after the sermon is the right place, preachers mustn’t think they are 6ft above contradiction. It’s just knowing the right context to do it in.

Death by feedback – Feedback on sermons is a good thing, particularly when you’re starting off. However, as you go on as a preacher, you ordinarily should be able to tell how things have gone. We have the phenomena in the UK of quite large preaching teams who give each other feedback weekly. What this can lead to I would argue is tentative, bland preaching that is particularly lacking in sharp application. The preacher has in his mind those who give feedback when he’s preaching and the sword is blunted,  there’s no edge to the preaching. I spoke at a conference once and on the first day was told I’d offended the women and on the second day the men by the third session I was so paranoid of offending anyone I played it safe and the result was the preaching equivalent of blancmange. As to how preachers give feedback to one another, I’m not convinced that our Preaching conferences are right either. I can’t see the point of giving a 10 minute talk on a passage you’ve not really prepared to other preachers who have done even less preparation than you have. The London preachers conference which I went to for a couple of years was helpful in this regard.  It took a recording of a recent sermon that the whole group listened to and then others gave meaningful feedback on it. That made sense in that people were listening to a sermon preached in the context of your congregation and were able to give helpful feedback on your preaching, not on a 10 minute talk you prepared in the car on the way to the conference. Feedback is valid; I’m grateful that my elders speak to me about my sermons, I’m thankful for good friends who will give me feedback after having heard me preach but not to the extent of blunting the preacher. There seems to me to be little tentative preaching in the New Testament.

Some Random Thoughts on Preaching (1)

These are going to be some random thoughts on preaching. Please don’t think I’m holding myself out to be an expert or a model; these are things I struggle with and am trying to think through. A friend of mine, who does church planter assessment, told me that when they ask aspiring church planters to grade themselves from 1-5 on various aspects of their lives, when it comes to preaching no one ever gives themselves less than a 4. On the other hand, I’ve got no interest in a fake, reformed spirituality about my preaching: ‘Aren’t I terrible?’.  We need to be able to step back and look at our preaching in the hope that we can improve. These are broad brush strokes and may even be contradictory but here goes…….

 

1. If you’re heart isn’t burning, neither will your listeners’ be – Do you believe what you are about to preach is the very living Word of God? Are you excited about what you are going to teach? The truth is, if you’re not excited, neither are your hearers going to be. It’s going to look different in different personalities but I sometimes find myself listening to preaching thinking, ‘Does the man preaching think this really matters?’ We can’t all be John Piper, in fact, there are few things worse than people who try to be (well, maybe those who try to be Tim Keller) but there must be a conviction that this matters and it matters to me and I want to tell you why it matters. Without that conviction I’m not sure we should be preaching at all.

 

2. Conference Preaching isn’t the same as week by week preaching – It may be different in America, where the same 8 people speak at each other’s conferences, but ordinarily in the UK if someone is asked to speak at a conference, they work very hard at it. Let’s face it, the sermon has probably been preached a number of times, in different contexts. Introductions and illustrations have been honed, we’ve read every commentary we can get our hands on, parts of the sermon that didn’t work 3rd time around have been reworked. Everyone pretends this isn’t the case but who are we kidding? The sermons at conferences are a bit longer and certainly more polished. I would even argue there is a type of conference speaker who has a kind of commanding presence up front. This cannot be our model for preaching regularly to the same people. The slickness of conference preaching should be in a completely different genre than the week by week exposition for a church. Preaching at its simplest level is getting people to keep going as Christians for another week. On the over used meal illustration, conference sermons are often 5 course, over the top dinners when week by week preaching is your Tuesday night lasagne. You probably won’t remember it in two days time but it gets you through to the next meal. We need to stop trying to be the next big name. I want to argue that the best preachers are those who are doing it every week. There’s a reality in the work of ministry that those who are away from the coal face easily forget. Every preacher has models and we need to make it men who are doing the hard yards week by week of preaching to their congregation.

 

3. We don’t have to teach everything in the passage – Most preachers I know take larger sections, a paragraph ordinarily, but sometimes, in Old Testament narrative, it can be chapters, even 2-3 chapters. Preaching on single verses is a neglected skill and does happen evangelistically but probably isn’t used enough. When taking the larger chunks my view is that preaching is not a comprehension exercise where we make sure that we’ve not missed any points in the passage. The aim mustn’t be just to transfer information from my notes into your notes. In our preaching we need to distil what we see as the main teaching point of the passage which by its necessity means that there will be things in the passage we don’t talk about and that is OK. Not every New Testament connection, cross reference, theological insight you’ve gleaned needs to be shared. Give us your one big point, what’s the issue that is burning in your heart from the passage? Most of our sermons have too much information and probably not enough application. Very few preachers I know can regularly preach effectively taking a whole chapter or two chapters. The work of distilling and shedding that which is unnecessary in sermons is time consuming and we need to be more brutal in getting rid of good thoughts and helpful material which is not essential to the sermon.