At times, we might contribute to this classic parishioner, blank stare.
One advantage of experiencing a couple of surgeries to extract a 6mm kidney stone from my right kidney was the opportunity to listen to a couple of sermons.
Preachers can relate to this. I was sincerely wanting to worship, not critique the sermon. But while I was worshiping, the homiletician in me thought, “Try to figure out the cause of the blank stare syndrome.”
I came up with two things over the past few weeks. They may help you as you prepare to preach.
First, I help create the blank stare when there is a lull in the emotional connection. There are sermon minutes filled with minutia that do not engage the listener. The data is not connected to any worship response. Many listeners who take God’s Word seriously will endure these minutes until the impact returns. But it’s painful for them and I don’t wan to cause this.
Second, I also help create the blank stare when there is a break in the logical flow of the subject matter. Too many minutes elapse as too many details are disconnected to the main worship response. And this can all happen within a well-crafted outline. Listeners easily lose their place in a sermon. Sometimes we lead them down this path of inactive learning by not connecting the individual concepts to their worship.
The two reasons I’ve listed cover the emotional and logical components of listening. Both are equally important for communication.
When you’re on vacation this summer and you’re a worshiper, play the reason-for-the-blank-stare game. God knows why you’re doing it. You want to be a better preacher. See if you experience what I did and for similar reasons.
And He will receive glory in the church and in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 3:21) because of His gift and your extra effort to improve.
Preaching While Dealing With A Kidney Stone! Yikes!
First, I have been out of commission for a couple of weeks due to fighting a kidney stone. To make a long story short, the first surgery was unsuccessful and the second surgery is scheduled for tomorrow.
The first surgery left me with a temporary stent in my right kidney. That stent prevented me from having another painful attack, but left me with nasty UTI-like symptoms. My main concern, apart from the occasional pain and discomfort, was whether or not I could preach yesterday without feeling like I had to go to the bathroom. And, trust me, with a stent in the ole saying, “When you gotta go, you gotta go,” is reality.
All that to say, this was one of those rare times in my 30 plus years of preaching that I had to preach not knowing whether I was up to the task physically.
If you’ve experienced something similar, then you know what that meant: I had to trust God more than normal.
I don’t like admitting that, but it’s true. I would rather write that I always trust God to the same degree for every sermon. But there is something about suffering for a couple of weeks that elevates the need for God’s help.
[I am keeping the past two weeks in perspective because I have parishioners who have been battling far greater suffering for much longer.]
Yesterday was a good reminder that God is merciful and I need His mercy, sometimes to a greater degree. The great thing about preaching is that it is God’s work. We do have a part to play in it, but I know He knows how much we need Him, especially when we’re struggling.
God was very gracious to me yesterday. I was able to preach a full-length message without having to run to the bathroom mid-sentence.
I hope you never have to preach with a kidney stone, but if you do our Lord will receive glory in the church and in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 3:21) as you entrust the sermon to His care.
Dave and I enjoyed fun times together at our Global Outreach Summit. He also has great interest in hermeneutics and homiletics.
Dave Shive is a 1968 graduate of Washington Bible College, and a 1972 graduate of Capital Bible Seminary with a Th.M. in New Testament Studies. He is also a 1994 graduate of the Baltimore Hebrew University where he received an M.A. in Biblical Literature. Dave also pursued doctoral studies at Baltimore Hebrew University.
He has spent the past 48 years in fulltime ministry as a pastor, Christian school director, college professor, and missions advocate.
Since 2008, Dave and Kathy have served as full time mission mobilizers. They are currently on staff with Frontier Ventures (formerly the U.S. Center for World Mission) in Pasadena, CA.
Dave and Kathy will celebrate their 54th wedding anniversary in June 2022. They have lived in Catonsville, MD, for 25 years. They have three married children, Dan, Mike, and Becky and are the proud grandparents of 11 grandchildren.
Working Harder to Preach Shorter
As a guest speaker, I was recently asked to limit my sermon to 25 minutes. As one who prefers 35 or 40 minutes to preach, I was confronted by a daunting challenge. Oddly enough, I find that preparing this short post on preaching short sermons is much more difficult than writing a longer post about preaching shorter sermons!
As I prepared my short(er) sermon, I recalled a senior pastor who, when asked by a guest preacher how long he could speak, replied, “Five minutes shorter than you think.” The senior pastor was probably thinking that he had heard many sermons that could be improved if only they were a bit shorter. One homiletics professor confided to me that each year one or two students would tell him that they could preach a better sermon in class if they were only allowed more pulpit time. The good prof’s response was always the same: “No, you couldn’t” (said with a smile).
As I was preparing my 25-minute sermon, the difficulties in preparing a shorter message were glaring. My struggle reminded me of the quote by Blaise Pascal: “I would have written a shorter letter, but I didn’t have the time.” Similar to Pascal, I realized I could preach a shorter sermon, but I would need a lot more prep time! Therein lies the dilemma of preaching with less allotted time.
To reduce the length of a sermon, more care is required in the selection of what to say. There also needs to be a ruthless culling of what NOT to say. Almost every pastor can agree that preaching for 25 minutes is harder than preaching for 45. Give me a text and I can preach on it for an hour with little preparation (I’m not saying it would be a good sermon!). But give me the same text and ask me to preach on it for 25 minutes and I would need significantly more prep time.
To preach a shorter sermon, one must be more deliberate, focused, conscious of every word, sentence, paragraph, and idea. Greater discipline is needed to make the best use of every precious minute. I found myself desperately returning again and again to my Big Idea to make sure everything I was saying was necessary and remained true to the text.
Oh, and a footnote to my story about my 25-minute sermon. When I arrived at my guest home the night before I was to preach, I was informed that I could take as much time as I needed! Relieved to hear that, I only exceeded my original time limit by a few minutes the next morning. I realized that my preparation for a 25-minute delivery enabled me to preach a much better sermon.This kind of sermon preparation is great practice in developing homiletical discipline. Try this sample exercise: If you have 40 minutes to deliver a sermon, prepare as if you only have 25 minutes to preach. See what happens!
Through the years I have always been intrigued by critiques and analyses of musical performers. Recently I enjoyed a documentary on the Beatles and once again came away with insights for preaching.
One interviewer/reviewer said of the Beatles:
“They were fresh and they were honest.”
Just those two things, but extremely important for explaining part of why this new singing group took the world by storm.
It got me thinking whether these two elements of being fresh and honest are important for preaching God’s Word in church on Sunday.
First, why is being fresh and honest important for preachers? Our listeners resonate with a sense of freshness that they hear in our preaching. This kind of freshness means that you and God are together in the study before the sermon. Freshness means God’s Spirit is teaching you in the study and in your sermons and lessons you are relaying what He is teaching you. It is very current, very fresh material.
Then there is honesty. This gives our listeners the assurance that you are being real in your own faith-journey. Your preaching and teaching is genuine, not contrived. Our listeners find it easier to listen to us because they feel we’re real, not fake.
Second, how do preachers accomplish being fresh and honest? This kind of freshness sounds different, but not in the sense of always coming up with things they’ve never heard before. It might be the way your use words and phrases. It may be your particular style, but it is unmistakably you.
And being honest? It includes an honesty about your own wrestling with the text. It includes honestly preaching the text no matter how it might sound to the listeners. It also includes the sense that you believe what you’re saying and that it’s a matter of life and death.
Anyway, I hope this creates some thinking on effectively communicating God’s Word. You probably have things come to mind immediately that could add to either being fresh or honest or both.
May any sense of Spirit-created freshness and honesty result in our Lord receiving glory in the church and in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 3:21),
Manuscripting your sermon isn’t about being clever.
I am writing this post on a Sunday evening. If you preached today you know that feeling of a sense of accomplishment, plus the usual nagging thoughts of, “It could’ve been better, Lord. I tried my best.”
I am enjoying the slow process of reentering my “normal” life. Like, for instance, getting back to my reading schedule which includes books like Jared E. Alcántara’s, The Practices of Christian Preaching: Essentials for Effective Proclamation.
In his introduction, Jared reminds his readers that what matters most is what we preach and “not just how we preach” (p. 6).
He quotes Augustine:
“There is a danger of forgetting what one has to say while working out a clever way to say it” (p. 6).
As I mentioned not too long ago, I had the privilege of working with two sections of Advanced Homiletics students in PA and MD. Part of their final sermon assignment involves writing a manuscript. They preach without it, but write it to practice what they want to say to their listeners. In almost every case it makes them better preachers since the practice makes them work harder on how they speak to their congregants.
Alcántara reminds us how important it is to develop sermon content based upon solid exegesis of the passage. That’s what we have to say. That’s where our authority comes from.
But there is a place for working on how we say it. Cleverness isn’t the goal but listenability and clarity are. So allow the practice of manuscripting to aid your communication. Just note Augustine’s warning. We can’t work so hard at being clever that we forget what we have to say.
As you begin to think hard about next Sunday strike a balance between careful exegesis (what to say) and engaging orascript (how you say it). Discover the strong foundation and then build on it.
And our Lord will receive glory in the church and in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 3:21).
Randal
P.S. I am curious as to what percentage of sermon prep time do you devote to crafting your words (as opposed to the raw exegesis).
Before getting back to sermon application, I wanted to take a moment to ask you about your word smithing. I know it’s not a word. The spell-checker just rejected my one-word and spit it into two.
One of the top five books on communication that I’ve ever read is Humes’, The Sir Winston Method. He analyzes and summarizes Winston Churchill’s powerful communication style.
A top takeaway from the book is the CREAM approach to crafting words. The acrostic stands for:
C = contrast
R = rhyme
E = echo
A = alliteration
M = metaphor
You can use this acrostic to guide the development of key concepts in your sermon such as your big idea or theme.
I am not great at this, but every once in a while my wordsmithing superpower kicks in. This happened a couple of times the past two weeks.
First, while preaching in 1 Corinthians 1:17ff. where Paul teaches about the cross of Christ and how foolish that message sounds, I urged our folks to
“stick to the script.”
This would help them fight the temptation to change their message ever so slightly to make our Gospel appear more palatable.
Then, yesterday while preaching Jude 5-10 I reviewed the purpose for our series with this broad directive:
“We proclaim the Gospel out there; we protect it in here.”
The first one has a lot of alliteration and a little bit of rhyming going on. The second example has more alliteration and a little bit of contrast.
If you’re serious about practicing CREAM, you’ll enjoy Humes’ relatively short, but packed paperback (see what I did there?). My Doctor of Ministry thesis, Teaching the Skills of Preaching, is not nearly as enjoyable, but does contain examples of CREAM.
May our Lord receive glory in the church and in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 3:21) as we put our word smithing (there it goes again!) superpowers to good use each Sunday.
This is a guest post written by Dr. Jeffrey Arthurs. Jeff is Professor of Preaching and Communication at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. We team up together each year to instruct Doctor of Ministry students in Preaching the Literary Forms of the Bible. He is the author of Preaching with Variety and Devote Yourself to the Public Reading of Scripture. I hope your enjoy and profit from his insights. I always do.
As a teacher of preaching for more than twenty years, I have listened to thousands of student sermons. Most of those sermons were biblically accurate, and most were theologically grounded. (I’m glad to see a growing trend toward Christ-Centered preaching). About half were interesting; about a third were clear; and about a quarter were applied with insight and specificity.
Here are my top three observations on how to improve:
(1) Think yourself clear. Our job is to “package” in 30 minutes what it took us 10+ hours to prepare. This demands ruthless simplicity. I’m not talking about dumbing it down. I’m talking about having your idea(s) so well in hand that you could deliver the gist of your sermon in 60 seconds or less.
(2) Be concrete in application. Come down the “ladder of abstraction” with real life examples. Show what the truth of the text looks like in actual situations for the actual people who sit before you. If the text urges us to be patient, ask yourself: when, where, with whom, how, and what hinders our patience? Read the Sermon on the Mount and notice how much time our Lord spends at the bottom of the “ladder of abstraction” with concrete application.
(3) Model. Be an example of speech, life, love, faith, and purity. Don’t be afraid to illustrate the text from your own life, either “positively” or “negatively.” To be sure, there are risks with each, but when done with humility, and when done in the context of pastoral ministry where you are more than just a talking head on Sunday morning, God’s truth through your personality is powerful. This is part of the way you can watch over their souls—by pointing out how you yourself are being saved through preaching.
Abe’s new book is very helpful, especially in the discussion about theology and application.
I decided to select Abe’s new book, A Manual for Preaching: The Journey from Text to Sermon, as one of the required textbooks for my upcoming sections of PAS 513 Advanced Homiletics (Lancaster and D.C. locations of Lancaster Bible College|Capital Seminary & Graduate School).
Abe does an excellent job summarizing the preaching task with respect to what happens each Sunday in church. Think about your preaching portion from this morning or the one you will be preaching on this coming Sunday. Can you see your preaching fitting into the following description?
“So each pericope [the section you’ve selected to preach on] is God’s gracious invitation to humankind to live in his ideal world by abiding by the thrust/force of that pericope–that is, the requirement of God’s ideal world as called for in that pericopal world segment (e.g., listening to/obeying only God’s voice, from 1 Sam. 15 [where King Saul failed miserably!]. And as humankind accepts that divine invitation and applies the thrust/force of the pericope, week by week and pericope by pericope God’s people are progressively and increasingly inhabiting this ideal world and adopting its values” (p. 29).
If we’ve selected them properly, our preaching portions contain “God’s gracious invitation” to our listeners to inhabit “his ideal world.”
That happens when we urge them to be or do what the pericope is requiring (what Abe calls its “thrust/force”).
Sunday after Sunday the cumulative affect is growing more and more into the likeness of Christ (“inhabiting this ideal world and adopting its values”).
Can you see why it’s impossible for congregations composed of some with “ears to hear” not to grow into a mature Body?
I can’t think of anything more fulfilling than being the mouthpiece for God’s invitation to live in his ideal world. And as we do that each weekend, may He receive glory in the church and in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 3:21).
The Opinion section seems fair and the writing is superb. Photo by Allie on Unsplash
Several months ago I decided to go back to getting a newspaper again. I was close to getting a subscription to digital curated news, such as Apple News, but the reviews were not great. I chose the Wall Street Journal thanks to a generous discount for educators. Or, was it students? That’s not important right now.
What is important is how the quality of WSJ’s writers is helping me be a better communicator of God’s Word.
Here are some lines from this weekend’s WSJ from one of my favorite writers, Peggy Noonan’s, Declarations: The GOP Tries to Make Its Case…
“If you weren’t moved by [Jon Ponder’s speech] you don’t do moved.”
Or, the reporting of Sen. Tim Scott’s speech which included the phrase,
“Because of the evolution of the Southern heart.” (explaining how “a black man who started with nothing [ended up in “Congress in an overwhelmingly white district in Charleston and beat the field, including the son of former-Sen. Strom Thurmond.”].
Or…
“[Republicans] hit on the one fear shared equally now by the rich, the poor and the middle: that when you call 911 you’ll go to voicemail.”
Or, my new favorite word I read several days ago: humblebrag.
So, in Psalm 18:23 David commits humblebrag when he claims: “I was blameless before him, and I kept myself from my guilt.” Much different than David’s confession in Psalm 38:18 “I confess my iniquity; I am sorry for my sin.”
There are several times in the earlier Psalms when David voices humblebrag. It’s a great word to describe how David can crow even though there were many times he had to eat crow.
I just wished I had remembered to say it in the sermon. Oh well.
May our Lord receive glory in the church and in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 3:21) because of our attempts to become better wordsmiths.
I believe that but also know of other preachers who have preached this text better!
In the middle of the week I began thinking about how much of my sermon-in-the-making is the result of my own thinking. I know about the debate surrounding whether or not anyone can ever have a truly original idea. And I’m not talking about plagiarizing either.
I guess I’m asking you to think about what parts of your sermon development and delivery are your work.
Let’s begin with some thoughts about using someone else’s material:
On one side of the spectrum, think about those times when you rely on an English dictionary, thesaurus, or original language lexicons and theological dictionaries. Now go all the way to the other side of the line and think about borrowing someone else’s sermon title and structure.
In the middle I put quotes or paraphrases from our favorite authors, like Jonathan Edwards, Augustine, or William Goldman (author and screenplay writer of The Princess Bride).
So, what do I bring to the equation? Every week by the grace of God I…
trace the argument of my preaching portion and discover how meaning is made before I know what that meaning is.
determine how this text intends to elicit worship (I complete the sentence: “We worship the Lord this morning by…”).
know enough about my congregants to know this text is relevant.
create a structure that leads to the theological meaning of the text.
talk to my listeners about their Christian experience from the text while I write out my sermon manuscript.
make critical word-choices that affect how the sermon sounds (an ora-script within the manuscript).
smile at them to let them know I love them.
show them how the Christ-event makes this text come true for those who believe.
What did I miss?
May our Sunday “originals” continue to give God glory in the church and in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 3:21),
