Category Archives: delivery

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Do You Let Your Listeners Know You Love Them While You’re Preaching And Does It Matter?

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I recently read the lead article of Crosswalk.com’s newsletter which arrived in my inbox on November 1, 2013. The article was, How to Spot a Healthy Church–Quickly, by Ray Pritchard. Ray suggests there are two indicators of a healthy church that visitors can spot immediately. The first one is hearty congregational singing. The second one caught my attention: obvious affection between the pastor and the congregation. It made me wonder what we can do while we preach to show genuine affection.

I’m a firm believer that people skills have a greater affect on a sermon’s hearing than exegetical skills. I must love my listeners as much as, if not more than, I love to study and preach to them. And the affect of interpersonal relationships on communication are well documented. Every communication event, including preaching, contains a content element and a relational element. The relational element affects how we receive the content and what we do with it. When our relationship with our congregants is healthy, they place more importance on our content. When our relationship is unhealthy, they place less importance on our content. In an unhealthy relationship, the words don’t mean as much or the same thing we intend. That’s part of the reason why when two people are arguing during tense times, you’ll hear something like, “That’s not what I meant!”

So, what can we do to let our listeners know we love them while we’re preaching?

  • smile at them
  • laugh with them
  • dialogue with them (besides being an effective teaching tool, dialogue during a teaching time is a great way to build rapport)
  • tell them (say things like, “you know I love you dearly…”, at appropriate times
  • join them as a fellow struggler on the Way
  • (add some others…)

Does your faith-family know you love them? Let it show while you’re preaching. Our best listeners are the ones who feel the love.

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Fight the Urge to Be Exhaustive (and exhausting?)

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I remind myself regularly, “Lord willing, we’ll cover that another time in another Text.” I’ll say that to parishioners periodically on a Sunday. It’s one of the benefits of preaching to roughly the same listeners each weekend. We do not have to worry about being exhaustive in every sermon.

 
If you’re a bit neurotic like me, you might be thinking: “That sounds like an excuse for shoddy sermons.” But that’s not my reason. Take, for instance, Luke 9:18-20 which contains Jesus’ crucial question, “Who do you say that I am?”, and Peter’s confession, “The Christ of God.” That paragraph begins in verse 18 with: “Now it happened that as he was praying alone, the disciples were with him…” I had to fight the temptation to elaborate on Jesus’ prayer life.
 
I fought that temptation because Luke provided no commentary; just the fact. Although Jesus’ prayer life–like yours and mine–was crucial to His relationship with God, it was incidental in this scene. On that particular Sunday I intended to communicate what God was saying through Luke and Luke wasn’t saying much about prayer. Here’s why often, less is more:
 
1. Less is often more because covering less leaves more time on Luke’s theology and intention for the Church. I’m finding that, as I develop as a preacher, I am consistently cutting out incidental, biblical data from my sermons. The longer I preach, the more I realize the need to spend more time on the parts of a preaching portion that contain theology that functions for the Church.
 
2. Less is often more because covering less also leaves more time for application. I can’t tell you the number of times I look at the clock on Sunday and wish I had an extra five minutes. Those extra minutes could be used to make sure we all know how to implement the theology when we leave church.
 
Obviously, this is not the only way to approach preaching in church. But in your attempts to be biblical, consider the value of accomplishing more by covering less.
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Do You Sound Like A Contemporary Preacher?

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I am enjoying reading Barth’s, Homiletics. In the preface, Bromiley previews Barth’s “belief that closeness to life, important though it is in the sermon, must not be at the cost of closeness to the text” (p. 14). That got me thinking about whether or not we preachers sound like our world with respect to our voice and delivery. Closeness to life is another way to speak of relevance; closeness to the text, of course, speaks of preaching with accuracy.

Lately, I have wondered if all TV news anchors and field reporters take a course in how to speak or how to sound while they’re reporting the news. Listen to them and you’ll discover that they all sound the same. At the risk of overgeneralizing, I’m suggesting that there are two dominant preaching styles, the traditional preacher and the conversational preacher. The conversational preacher includes the real relevant, seeker-sensitive approach.

What do you sound like when you preach? Would our listeners say that we sound like a preacher (with respect to how we say what we say)? When we report on what God has said, do we sound like all the other contemporary, seeker-sensitive preachers who evidently took the same class on how to speak or how to sound? We must be constantly aware of the tension between closeness to life (relevance, or, in this case, sounding relevant) and closeness to the text (accurate reporting). I loved Barth’s advice: “For in preaching it is always better to be too close to the text than to be too thematic or too much in keeping with the times” (p. 117).

Sometimes I wished just one TV news reporter would break from that mold, be real, and talk to me about what happened.

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Becoming a Moody Preacher

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A moody person is someone who is given to changes of mood.  Because the mood of the sermon needs to match the mood of the Scripture, preachers end up being moody.  I confess a bit of resistance to this thought.  I am a fairly even-keeled-kind-of-guy, not given to mood swings.  However, listen to how drastically the mood changes from Romans 16:16 to Romans 16:17.  Greeting one another with a holy kiss sounds very welcoming.  Watching out for those who cause division sounds very threatening.  The mood of the preacher should probably match the mood of the passage.  Your personality may cause you to lean more naturally in one direction, but be open to being a moody preacher.

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The Relationship Factor in Pastoral Preaching

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Which do you love more, the preaching or the people?  Yesterday Michele and I enjoyed the rare opportunity to worship with another faith-family.  The pastor, Lanny Kilgore, is a good friend of mine and a very good shepherd.  What struck me about seeing him preach was how much he enjoyed the parishioners during the sermon.  I could tell that he loved them as much as he loved preaching.  In his book, Preaching & Preachers, Lloyd-Jones quotes Anglican preacher, Richard Cecil: “To love to preach is one thing, to love those to whom we preach quite another” (p. 105). Sometimes when I hear sermons, I get the impression that the sermon would sound the same and the preacher would preach the same even if nobody was listening.  The people really didn’t matter to the preacher, but only the sermon mattered.  Ask yourself how much the presence of listeners affects your delivery.  May our Lord give us a heart that loves His people as much as we love the proclamation of His Word.

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What Keeps Your Sermon From Fragmenting?

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I recently returned from a wonderful week with doctoral students enrolled in Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary’s Doctor of Ministry track, Preaching the Literary Forms of the Bible.  We met on GCTS’s Charlotte, NC campus.  One of the things we talked about was keeping our sermons from fragmenting.  Fragmentation happens when I (1) fail to follow the flow of thought created by the Author/author or (2) I choose to replace the existing flow of thought with my own deficient presentation.  We noticed a tendency of not clearly stating the logical connections between moves or thought-blocks in the sermon.  What is clear in the mind of the preacher is unclear to the listener.  While you’re developing your sermon double-check all your transitions as you move from major clause to major clause.  Ask if you are carrying the logic forward.  As you know, theology is conveyed more through the logical flow of thought than in the isolated content.